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On the other hand, a site with 4 or more hyphens is probably up to no good. Would it make sense to progressively penalize domains, depending on how many hyphens they have?
Anyway, I don't evidence of any penalties at the moment and I never have in the past.
Wonder if when google corrected their -ldfjsdlfjlsk flaw they missed that little - up too?
Irritating to say the least!
Maybe there's a possibility Google sees hyphenated domains as a white flag, then checks those sites for keyword stuffing, etc. If they find signs of SEO, they ban the site and if not, the site stays in good position.
I think there is an extremely high likelyhood that when looking for over-SEOed sites, that a hypenated domain will count as a point in their scoring system, but only a point.
Why? because it one of the things that tends to make it into the "check lists" for the script kiddie version of SEO.
You all know what I mean. The thread comes up here about evey 6 weeks, "What are the top 20 things that I need to do to get top ranking". But they don't want to follow Brett's 12 month plan.
That's what a human reviewer would do. And over at the ODP, an experienced editor will see these keyword-hyphenated domains and immediately think, this probably redirects to [watch-out-suckers-this-site-redirects-to-affiliate-spam.com...]
And, you know, we're right 99% of the time. There isn't any other "spam flag" that's so reliable.
But ... Google doesn't DO the ten-thousand-volunteers-on-keyboards routine. They have other (automated) tests for spam. But I'm betting that if Google finds a good way of detecting affiliate, doorway, or other sites of no value except to the webmaster and to his advertising/promotional customers -- then hyphenated domains will get hit hard. And ... everyone seems to agree that commercial doorways got hit hard by Florida, so I'd expect hyphenated-keyworded domains to have been hit especially hard, even if Google didn't target them directly (just targeted the mindset that creates such things.)
Yes! Together with lots and lots of nice, unique sites.
I dont think so. Bcoz I think there is nothing in google who can determine this is the doorway page and this is the main page. Do you think so...?
Is there any special code for doorway page :)
...an experienced editor will see these keyword-hyphenated domains and immediately think [spam]
Back in '98 or so I registered a company-product domain name (with hyphen) because I didn't want a 14 letter URL that made no sense and encouraged typos.
I errored in that I did not also get the non-hyphenated version, which has since been sucked up by a squater taking advantage of my semi-success.
There was never an effort to spam, nor was there at that point any awareness that there was or would ever be any advantage to a hyphenated domain name.
I would hope that "experienced" editors do not so easily jump to conclusions, although this post may explain why so many complain about the time it takes to be reviewed by DMOZ. Perhaps their sites remain in the queue based simply on their domain name?
WBF
Probably not. We do a lot of triage. I usually take a quick look at them, to see how obvious the spam is. If it is very obvious (as it nearly always is) then I reject immediately. No use letting leaving spam to clog the arteries. If it's not very obvious (that is, it might conceivably even not be spam) I leave for the normal review process.
Having reviewed over 50,000 sites I think I've seen a representative sample: nobody who hasn't done that can accuse _me_ of jumping to conclusions! But a few hundred site reviews in Shopping categories would give any editor the same conclusion, if not the same confidence in it.
For commercial searches that exactly match a hyphenated domain name how many people lost ground in Florida and how many stayed put?
Example: www.blue-widget-production.com
Does a search for blue widget production now still produce good results or are your sites nowhere to be found?
I'd like to get an idea of percentages if possible to see if the argument holds ground.
I'm talking about highly competitive or commercial keywords, not company names.
My own site as well as a good friend of mine have both disappeared completely for exact searches where the keywords are in the domain name.
Was blue widget production in your title tag?
