Help an SEO-DUMMY : ) Established hyphenated domain...redirect?!...new domain?!

[KL2014]

Hello, everybody.

I am definitely not an SEO specialist. My family owns a transportation business (since 2010) and i am the one responsible for the website (until we find a good SEO company).

My question:

Several years ago i did not know much about SEO and have chosen a domain name www.airporttransportation-limo.com (it is not the actual domain...just an example...i'm not sure if i can post the real website here) and another domain that is just the name of our company (it also has hyphen in it).

Both websites are still doing good and we receive quite a bit of traffic, but i read more an more about how hyphenated domains and domains with more then two worlds can be bad for your SEO/business/traffic.

I feel like the websites are stuck and not moving up any more..could that be because of the hyphens?

I registered another domain that is the name of our company (which is well known by now) without any hyphens.

Now i have no idea what to do. Should i redirect both old domains (old websites are different and do not have duplicate content) to the new one, or should i just redirect the old domain (just the name of our company with hyphen) to a new one (without hyphen) and leave the www.airportransportation-limo.com as is... Or maybe i should register another domain without any hyphens (two words only) and redirect the www.airporttransportation-limo.com to it...

I am very nervous to make any changes and loose all the traffic. My family will kill me.

Please help! I'm lost!

[acceleratormktg]

Hi Karina! This is a little bit of tricky question, simply because there are so many unknowns. It doesn't sound like you're being penalized in any way since you are still ranking a little bit, but just aren't increasing in the rankings any longer. It has been my experience that with older domains, like your hyphenated one, it doesn't matter too much if it's hyphenated or has two words, etc. in it. Usually age trumps all.

If you just want to move your site since you already bought the new domain name, make sure to follow these best practices from Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83105?hl=en

However, I would be very happy to take a look at your site for you and give you a better and more helpful response. Just shoot me your website via a private message and I'll do some research for you and get back to you.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Karina,

It is unlikely that you are being penalised for having a hyphenated domain, but Google do say that hyphens, especially on a dot com, are something of a spam signal, so tend to be flagged, but that doesn't automatically mean it is going to happen, or has happened.

Moving forwards has a lot to do with your business objectives; do you want to build your company brand? What is the scope for moving forwards with the current domains in relation to this?

Unless you want to re-brand, I would suggest looking at the site first to see if there are any glaring errors, but I suspect it will be a lack of link / content / social activity that is starting to hold you back now.

There is also part of the Google algorithm that looks at exact match domains, but this shouldn't be a worry as long as the content matches the intent of the domain.

Have you done much in terms of link building to the site, and do you have authorship set up? There may even be opportunities to include some Schema / Micro Data to help enhance the site, but that depends more on the site and content.

Happy to answer any further questions.

Andy