Exat Match Domains(hypen)?

[Guest]

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[EGOL]

About two years ago I had a key-word.com and did a 301 redirect to an exact copy of the site on keyword.com (which had been a spammy site about six years previously).  Rankings shot up impressively.  Amazingly.   That key-word.com had less than one year of history in the SERPs and not a lot of offpage SEO.

About one year ago I did the same thing with a key-word.com that had a ten year history at #1 in the SERPs for its main KW and a lot of traffic.  Rankings dropped a place or two almost across the site.  I got the important ones back but it took over six months and a lot of lost income.

So, my experience is not absolutely clear, right?

I have a few keyword.com domains that we work on every day and watch closely.  In my opinion, the value of a KW.com was diminished in google about February 2011.  They still give some advantage when you try to rank for Exact Match queries... but a bit less then they used to.

[AlanMosley]

I agree with egol, they are not what they used to be. I'll will jsut add one thing, hythens look a bit spammy, and i dont think they convert as well.

[EGOL]

Yes... and it is really really hard to give a URL over the phone when it has a hyphen.  Also, you will lose a lot of traffic to the domain without the hyphen.  The more successful you become the more traffic you will lose to them.  Your friends will even visit the wrong site.  I am glad that I don't use them for these two businesses any more.

[MoosaHemani]

I pretty much agree with EGOL and in January 2011 I did a small research on it and find out that domains based in ‘-’ hyphens are not really ranking higher for competitive keywords. I believe if one have a choice between keyword.com and key-word.com then I would always prefer him to go for a domain with keyword.com

There are some other problems with hyphen based domain names that includes branding, loss of traffic and more…

[southcoasthost]

I pretty much agree with what EGOL has said.

From my experience if keyword.com is not available check for keyword.org / keyword.net before trying key-word.com

Just from my experience I have had better results when excluding the hyphen.

[EGOL]

You can also go to the guy who owns keyword.com and try to buy it.  Lots of people will sell.  They often want a lot of money - especially if they are in the domain biz... but you might be able to talk them down or justify the high price.

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