Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Does it also applies for sites that names the site pages using hyphens?
For example domain.com/dir/i-love-webmaster-world-forums.php
Also please tell for what reasons google penalises a domain?
I don't have much experience, i apologise if i asked a stupid question.
Is google ignoring the inner pages cos of hyphens?
Should i remove the hyphens?
Sometimes dashes are necessary in the domain name to describe the business the way you wish it to be.
If this is the case it is definitely something that needs to be look at further.
Is google ignoring the inner pages cos of hyphens?
Lots of sites without hypens have same problem. Dont think it is a factor.
They both cause problems.
Why do you think underscores are bad?
IMHO, Having to choose between a period & a dash, I find the period the eaiser to read seperator if I cannot make proper use of the underscore.
Back To Watching,
WW_Watcher
I am more concerned about URLs.
It probably comes down to the question of whether your site is clean in other respects.
There's nothing inherently suspicious about hyphens in URLs. If I have an article about Elbonian kayak cruises, I'm likely to call it "elbonian-kayak-cruises.htm." I suppose I could call it "elbonian_kayak_cruises.htm," but the principle is the same: The filename is more descriptive and easier to remember than onelongstringofwordslikethis.htm, so it makes sense from any reasonable point of view. I can't believe that Google would penalize me for such filenames (certainly Google hasn't done so to date).
But, if I also had a domain with a long string of "money words" and hyphens and a crosslinking pattern with half a dozen other hyphenated domains and an unnatural keyword density and 10,000 inbound links from blogs and off-topic "links" pages, the hyphenated URLs might trigger a spam alarm in Google--as it should, for reasons of statistical probability alone. We can only speculate, of course, but we're living in the 21st Century, not the 1990s, and it isn't unreasonable to assume that spam filters or detectors are more sophisticated today than they were half a dozen years ago.
I used folder name as "keyword1_keyword2"
I think Google won't penalize any site, if the content is worthful, there are relevant links to site, and out links towards other relevant sites.
About the deep pages, i won't use more than 2 undescores.
Many people suggested me to make site about one topic, so now i am concentrating on one topic.
[edited by: Thaparian at 6:01 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]
There is no reason at all why Google or any other SE would care if the domain name is bluewidgets.com or blue-widgets.com.
If it did, then explain why our sites - of which two out of three main ones are hyphenated - are #2 to #5 in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search for the 5 most common search terms....
And that is out of: Results 1 - 10 of about 41,900,000 for [...] the main key word.
[edited by: Wlauzon at 6:37 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]
There is no reason at all why Google or any other SE would care if the domain name is bluewidgets.com or blue-widgets.com.
In your example, there is only one hyphen.
There's a big difference between one hyphen and two. And even a bigger difference between two hyphens and three. If you've reached the three hyphen level, there's a good chance that you are attracting "negative points" in the overall scoring of your site.
I also think that most of us can attest that when you get to 3 or more hyphens in the domain, the quality factor seems to diminish exponentially.
If it did, then explain why our sites - of which two out of three main ones are hyphenated - are #2 to #5 in Google, MSN, and Yahoo search for the 5 most common search terms.
This is typically what will happen with a single hyphen domain name that matches the search query. If the basics of SEO have been addressed, then I would "expect" you to be in those top positions for your most common search terms, particularly if they contained the words in the domain name.
Someone pointed out that a big reason people choose hyphenated domain names is that the good unhyphenated names are often long gone.
I suspect that many hyphenated domains face a slight disadvantage simply because they're newer, not because there are any intrinsic penalties for hyphens in the domain name.
I have a hyphenated domain name that right from the start (about two years ago) has failed to rank for the two words making up the domain phrase (pretty much the same as the icecreame-shop example above).
Yes, I do see that as a penalty for this exact phrase. Hoever, the site has now problems what so ever for other words or phrases, not even the first of the words in the domain phrase.
So. I do believe you should stay out of hyphenated domains.
As for lots-and-lots-and-lots of hyphens in URLs, I agree with the majority. They alone, aren't a reason for penalties, but they might very well be weited into the equeation when Google looks for those "signs of SEO".
About the deep pages, i won't use more than 2 undescores.
One hyphen in a domain name is not going to translate into a penalty. It's a signal, very quiet one, that will probably be ignored as long as the rest of the site is clean.
Two hyphens is a slightly louder signal, but again, if Google is convinced your site is legit, that signal should be ignored as a false positive.
Ten hyphens in a domain name - now if that didn't sound an alarm with Google I'd be very worried.
Consider what Matt Cutts said about having multiple domains on the same IP and releasing millions of pages on domain launch (paraphrased): "four domains on a single IP, no problem - 2,000 domains on the same IP probably means they're spam..Couple thousand pages should be no problem...millions of pages, that's a hole another ball of wax).
In other words, think shades of grey(not yes/no) and threshold.
Also keep in mind if you use bluewidget.html instead of blue-widget.html, you're only going to (slightly) improve your ranking for "bluewidget", not "blue widget." And if you decide to use underscores ("blue_widget"), you're only optimizing for "blue_widget", which I doubt will pull much traffic.
[edited by: Halfdeck at 10:34 am (utc) on Sep. 4, 2006]
Two hyphens is a slightly louder signal, but again, if Google is convinced your site is legit, that signal should be ignored as a false positive....
I am betting that NOBODY has any real evidence for that or any similar statements. And I have never seen anything from any of the search engines that that they would care about hyphens.
Not to mention that it defies common sense that they would care.
This all sounds like an urban myth to me, and I have never seen any evidence either way that hyphens - including more than 2 or 3 - has ANY effect on the search engines. In fact I wonder if they even LOOK at the name, and don't just all use the actual IP address internally...
I think my visitors would like www.mysite.com/something-something.php as it makes sense.
And therefore that is what I will be going with.
Should we not be thinking about our customers rather than the search engines?I think my visitors would like www.mysite.com/something-something.php as it makes sense.
What is wrong with www.my-site.com/cate-gory/file-name.html. In my opinion this more userfriendly, because the visitor can see by the url in which branch of the website he is surfing. I think it´s confusing, when you have a lot of pages without any subdirectory (category). I´m sure there is limit of hyphens.
Anything that looks better for the customer wins for me.
I heard Matt Cutts mutter something about it, the last time that he talked about "Signals of Quality".
I am betting that NOBODY has any real evidence for that or any similar statements.
I would think this can be easily determined. Just run a search on 10 terms and view the first 50 results. How many domains have one hyphen? Two? Three? Etc.
What percentage of those domains are hyphenated in those first 50 results? One hyphen? Two? Three? Etc.
I do quite a bit of research on a daily basis and use Google a majority of the time. I don't see many hyphenated domains in the spaces I do research in. I do see more sub-domains.
Not to mention that it defies common sense that they would care.
Forget about caring and think about statistics. Let's imagine that Google's search team feeds examples of good and bad pages into a computer. The computer analyzes those good and bad examples to determine a "junk page" profile, and it finds that 75% of the pages with three hyphens in the domain name are junk. As a result, triple-hyphenated domain names are likely to be a negative signal of quality that could cause problems with rankings if a page fits a "junk page" profile in other ways.
I Can show loads of domain that use hypens in domain name and sub domain and directory and.. are doing just good.
the reason some did not believe it for a long time is that — as is true with so many of G’s algo elements — things are co-dependent. So the addition of x 1,000 pages for site A will not have the same effect as the addition of 1,000 pages for site B, and the difference is not just limted to the pre-existing number of pages on each site. Many other factors involved.-caveman
Here's what Vanessa the Vampire Slayer said about user-friendly urls:
Next, consider this page name:123244ffgfhdsled99eddgdd.html
It doesn’t take a special tool to know that the URL isn’t user-friendly. Compare it to:
african-elephants.html
But you can have too much of a good thing. It also doesn’t take a special tool to know that this page name isn’t user-friendly:
african-elephants-and-their-habitats-and-diet-and-history-and-extinction-possibilities-and-this-page-is-really-great.htm
