New domain name advice

[swones]

Something to ponder over whilst waiting for the update to settle.

Currently I have my main domain name in the format of widgetsworld.com but I am thinking of registering widgets-world.com purely to get one of my keywords recognised in the domain name. I would still like to keep publicising the non hyphenated version to the world as I don't think it sounds as good, especially spoken, to hear the hyphen. What would be my best course of action to get Google to recognise the hyphenated version as the main name for my site? Should I move the site to the hyphen version and 301 everything else to it? Or should I keep all as is and 301 the hyphenated name to it?

Thanks.

Apologies if I've missed this discussion elsewhere.

Simon.

[Brad]

Frankly, I would stick with what you have. The hyphenated domains are hard to get word of mouth referrals from and might not be considered as being as respectable as the all one word domain.

Keywords in domain names are over rated. Any edge with the search engines that having a KW in the domain might add can be worked around with traditional SEO techniques.

[WebGuerrilla]

What you may gain by adding the hyphen will be offset by the loss of inbound links. But if you still want to do it, move the site to the hyphen domain and setup a 301 from the old one.

You can continue to use the old one for offline marketing and Google will index the new one.

[mmr82]

Use both...

widgets-world.com - for better rankings
widgetsworld.com - For easy reference.

So I'd suggest you move the site to the hyphen version and 301 everything else to it

[rfgdxm1]

Try to deemphasize the non-hyphenated one. If someone forgets the hyphen, the redirect to the hyphenated one means you still get the traffic. Also, if you are widgetworld.com it is dumb not to also have widget-world.com. What if a competitor buys widget-world.com to tries and steal your business?

[swones]

Thanks for some good advice. If I was to move the site to widget-world.com and 301 everything else to it, will inbound links to the old url's still be counted by google as links to widget-world.com? I suspect not as I can see how that would be easily open to abuse. I've already got the hyphenated version/s of the name but they are dormant at the moment, I think I may just 301 them to the current site and not worry about it too much! hehe

Simon.

[Brian]

Brad: I agree about hyphenated domains being really tacky to say, but my experience is that keywords in the domain are in fact very powerful. If the Widget Corporation owns widget.com (I guess somebody does), then I think widget.com will be quite hard to beat on widget. Maybe hot-pizza.com won't make too much difference, but I have quite a few pages where I think I am being beaten purely on the algo's love of the domain name.

I guess we all have slightly different experiences.