citynameservice.xx

is this the right way round?

[nippon]

when considering new generic type domains what are you opinions about the format:

should it be

1 citynameservice

or

2 servicecityname

as from my experience 1 sounds better but after looking at overture etc it seems people are searching for 2

which do you think is better?

[Quadrille]

It depends what you are going to use them for, and from an SEO POV, it really makes no odds; even if you used city-service.com or service-city.com

Without the hyphen, you'll get strange bedfellows - no-one searches for cityservice or servicecity, except by accident, and most SEs will prioritize terms that are searched for.

[nippon]

hiya

thanks for the input

are you saying that hyphens are good things here? i thought that g was good at differentiating words in domains...

and i feel its harder to market especially offline.

btw has anyone had any success with these kind of generic domains generating traffic and sales?

what have been your problems and successes?

thanks

[Quadrille]

Hyphens are not 'cool'; if overused they look positively spammy 'get-rich-quick-example.info/get-even-richer.htm' etc.

And yes, Google probably can parse cityservice these days. But the fact remains that people won't search for cityservice, and Google will prioritize the search term they actually use.

A hyphenated-join or a period.connection are read as a space, and of the two, the hyphen is clearer than anything that cannot be seen when there's a blue underline!

Don't even think about_underscore, which is poorly parsed and searched for even more rarely than joinedup, if that's physically possible.

[jtara]

no-one searches for cityservice or servicecity, except by accident

Hoo boy! Don't tell webwork! Hornet's nest. Opened. ;)

If your site's in English, you want cityservice. servicecity word order is unnatural.

[HuskyPup]

If your site's in English, you want cityservice. servicecity word order is unnatural.

Totally agree.

Insofar as hyphens are concerned it should not be a problem, I have some very succesful sites that have been deliberately promote as widget-example however I also owned the non-hyphenated versions.

There is a thread about underscores are seen as separators by Google now however I have to say that in all of Google's lifetime I've never had a problem with them in their SERPs whatsoever:

[webmasterworld.com...]

YMMV