SEO Domain Values

[Ventura]

I always thought that there was no difference in value between a .com and .net, also that hyphens have the same value as the keyphrase without the hyphen. But I have heard Rand lately saying hyphens are spammy - whats the go?

Is CarParts.com better than Car-Parts.com or Car-Parts.net etc?

[MarcLevy]

I would definitely take carparts.com over car-parts.com and I would definitely take the .com over a .net (however a .com does not automatically trump a .net for rankings). If someone with a .net has a better site, better service and better inbound marketing then they will outrank you.

However .com is the most commonly used tld and having that automatically gives you an advantage. If your car parts business becomes popular and is spreading via word of mouth, it is way more likely that people will search or link to you using a .com rather than a .net.

However don't be put off completely by hyphens, then can still work. car-parts.com is still potentially an ok domain name. I think when Rand refers to spammy domain names he is talking about 2 hyphens plus! Like www.cheap-car-parts-boston.com. Again, please remember that people are more likely to search for and link to a domain without the hyphen, another advantage. It is always annoying to tell people about the hyphen when discussing a domain or website, so try and avoid if possible.

[RyanKent]

Marc offers a solid response. I just want to elaborate a bit more on two of the points he made.

Take any major business....McDonalds, Facebook, IBM, etc...then add .com and you have their corporate website. People are used to finding the best businesses that way. If you obtain the carparts.net site you are guaranteed to have a percentage of customers wind up on the carparts.com site. If that site shows great products or prices on the home page, your customer might never make it to your site. You could lose them to another company. The same idea with hyphenated names. You will lose some business if there is a quality .com site in position.

From a ranking perspective, it makes no difference whether your site is .com or .net or .biz. It also does not matter if your name is hyphenated or not. It is purely a matter of getting people to connect with your site.

[Ventura]

Thanks Marc and Ryan, appreciate the feedback and I share your thoughts. Personally I would go for a dot com anyday too (but that takes deep pockets for a keyphrase dot com), but from an SEO perspective .net or hyphen seems to stack up equally so far..it's Rands recent comments about the Panda update and hyphenated domains that has me wondering what could be happening with hyphens now.

Has anyone done any tests to see if hyphens are spammy? and how many hyphens it takes to be classified as spammy?