Forum Moderators: phranque
I registered city1-city2.com a few days ago. Today I decided to check and no one had registerd the non-hyphenated version of city2city1.com so I picked that up as well.
So would it be better to run the site on the city2city1.com domain and park city1-city2.com on it .. or vice versa?
To add to the fray .. I decided to register city1city2.org. :/
Someone else beat me to city1city2.com, so anyone typing that in will get the "other" site ..
I'm also wondering what happens when someone types in city1 city2 (with the space). All other things being about equal, which will get the hit?
Do you mean "sister cities", as in, Podunk, Iowa and Kobe, Japan (just making it up, have no idea...) or as in Minneapolis-StPaul?
OK, somebody might enter Minneapolis-StPaul - IF they are a good typist. But StPaul-Minneapolis?
Naw.
I'm struggling to understand why anybody would ever enter city1city2, city2city1, or the hyphenated versions in the first place...
I asked 2 pretty different questions.
But if you think folks won't type in things like "stpaul" .. you need to look at some of my logs:
thaland
thialand
tiland
bangkok
bankok
bancock
chiang mai
chaing mai
chiang mi
chaingmi
chaiangmai
chaingmai
chain mai
chainmai
hua hin
huahin
huhin
cham
cha am
cha-am
chaam
Shall I continue?
People traveling to a foreign country (and looking at travel sites) may well not have the colloquial sequence familiarity as natives will.
Now would you care to take a turn at the primary question?
I'm also wondering what happens when someone types in city1 city2 (with the space). All other things being about equal, which will get the hit?
Ah, I missed the bit about the space.
They'll get a "site not found" error.
That is, unless, the browser they are using redirects invalid URLs to a search engine or (as is the default for Firefox) directly to the result of a Google "I'm feeling Lucky" search.
In that case it's not predictable what they will get. It will depend on the search-engine rankings of the the sites.
In fact, it's more likely that they will land on some official government site, because that's likely the top-ranking site for the cities.
(Assuming that you actually mean "twin cities", like Minneapolis-St. Paul, as opposed to "sister cities" - the kind that exchange time capsules and whose mayors go on junkets half-way around the world to visit their "sister" and get the keys to the city. In the latter case, who knows what they will get for that search - possibly a newspaper story about the mayor's trips...)
In any case, I think it's moot. The other guy already got the only domain name that matters for type-ins. Stick a fork in any type-in expectations. You're going to get so few type-ins that it doesn't matter which one you go with.
For branding purposes, I'd certainly go with one of the choices that lists the cities in the most natural order that people would speak them. One speaks of Minneapolis-StPaul, not StPaul-Minneapolis. While I think the larger city would normally come first, I would go with whichever is normally used - there may be some atypical cases.
I'd probably go with the .org, without the dashes, myself.
I'm also wondering what happens when someone types in city1 city2 (with the space).
If you're talking about search engine queries, (not that clear from your post) my guess would be that both domains will appear in the SERPS because they contain both keywords, but I would also think that the dashed version would rank a little higher.
Actually, using jtara's example, typing various versions of "Minneapolis-StPaul" into browser address bars:
*FF defaults to Google or siggraph.org or craig's list or MSP airport
*IE defaults to Live Search
*Opera returns 404, but "Minneapolis StPaul" defaults to Google
Using my city names ("sister" or "twin" seems to be irrelevant)
*FF defaults to a hotel booking site
*IE defaults to Live Search
*Opera defaults to Google
#2 - Avoid a hyphenated anything if you can, if someone wants to come back they'll often type in and end up on the non hyphenated version, aka your competitors.
#3 - It doesn't matter in the end which you go with, on page SEO will determine what searches your site returns for, the domain name doesn't factor heavily.
The domain name itself, although useful if descriptive, isn't as critical as it used to be. Every city name on the planet has had its .com taken by the way. Companies even bought up the .net, and .org version as well of more populated cities. Actually you'll miss the boat on "city+primary word" unless you hurry.
