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.
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