Edit – This article was written a long time ago now, and best-practice has actually now changed. The investigation in this article finds that hyphens in a domain name have a negative effect, wheras Google has since recommended their use to help identify spaces between words.
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You might have seen Silktide’s SEO challenge, where three intrepid developers battled to get their website the highest in Google’s rankings for the obscure term: ‘frictionless owls’
Here’s the order they came when we finished the challenge:
- frictionlessowls.com – My site had content rich with relevant keywords.
- www.frictionlessowls.co.uk – Ali’s site had a few pages of unique content.
- frictionless-owls.com – Oliver’s site with machine-generated nonsensical content.
Continue reading How one tiny hyphen destroyed our SEO efforts