keywords w hyphens for domain names

Do SEs like hyphens?

[poet]

I am a small press book publisher. I'd like to generate traffic to mini-sites with info about our books. But paid clicks, etc. are beyond my reach. What should my priorities be? I was thinking that I should set up some keyword-keyword.extn sites and use a 301 permanent redirect to send traffic to my book sites.

I am under the impression that this would be a cheap and easy way to get SE attention. Am I right?

And, if so, what should be the next step in cost/benefit for SEO?

[submitx]

Do not get anything over 2 dashes. They get penalized in Google. Any domain you get having dash or not would not make big difference. What it comes down to is content and a lot of links. A domain with no links to it is no good.

[IndianGuy]

Buying a domain which is short, hyphenated, makes it easy for people to read. If it is meaningful i.e. relates to your product and is easily read, apart from the possibility of it being used by search engines, people are more likely to click on it anyway.
There are theories floating around that search engines do use hyphenated domain names (or domains with underscores) as a small part of their ranking algorithm, though it is not yet proven (and probably won't be ever conclluded anyway). In my view, using short hyphenated domain names do no harm and can only be beneficial. Having said that, for what ever hyphenated domain you buy, ensure you have researched the non-hyphenated equivelant of that domain, as that domain may steal some of your traffic, as some people, will forget to use the hyphen when they manually type in the domain.

[poet]

Hmmm...I guess my idea of having websites with keyword domains that provide links to a central site with the content might be flawed--if I need a lot of content and links to boost the rankings of these "pointer" sites?

Am I making any sense? I want to have one great body of content on one site. Then I want to have little sites with keyword domain names that point to the major body of content. I was hoping to snag keyword traffic and send it to the larger site by offering hyperlinks.

Would it be better for the pointer or feeder sites to simply have a 301 permanent redirect? Perhaps Google would then rank them higher because it would see the main content site with its links and use those to decide that the pointer domain name should be ranker higher?

[jk3210]

>>Would it be better for the pointer or feeder sites to simply have a 301 permanent redirect? Perhaps Google would then rank them higher because it would see the main content site with its links and use those to decide that the pointer domain name should be ranker higher?<<

I'd recommend concentrating on the main site and forgeting the other stuff.

The flaw in your plan is that the "feeder sites" more than likely aren't going to produce any meaningful traffic without a lot of work, so why not put that effort into something that will benefit you long-term --your main site.

Google tries hard to find your content, so why make it hard for them to do so.

Plus, there's always the chance Google will see your network as a "domain farm" and flush the entire set-up.

[poet]

Thanks, JK. I think your logic is sound.

I have a ton of great content. Better to concentrate on presenting this content than to get clever.

Cheers,

[rfgdxm1]

>There are theories floating around that search engines do use hyphenated domain names (or domains with underscores) as a small part of their ranking algorithm, though it is not yet proven (and probably won't be ever conclluded anyway).

The evidence looks to me very strong that some search engines, notably Google, do give a benefit to hyphenated domain names. I speculate there are 2 reasons why:

#1) It is difficult when the domain name is composed of keyowrds to parse out the keywords; and in fact even trying likely is a Bad Idea. This site's domain name is a classic example: webmasterworld.com. Should that be parsed as webmaster-world.com, or web-master-world.com? If a SE algo just took a stab at guessing, and chose the latter, it would think this site is about Brett's attempt at global domination via the WWW. ;)

#2) The benefit is an artifact of SEs giving benefit to anchor text in rankings. Invariably some sites will just link without specific anchor text to another site. If the site is bluewidgets.com, and the anchor text is "Blue Widgets", the site gets a boost for those 2 keywords on a search. However, if the link is a simple [bluewidgets.com,...] then the site only get anchor text for "bluewidgets". However, if the site is blue-widgets.com, and the link is [blue-widgets.com,...] the site gets anchor text benefit for "blue widgets", and not "bluewidgets"; the latter being something people won't likely search on.