I found out, that google hates a character?

Hey everyone.

I made a statistic about the top10 websites for 100 keywords.

And what I found is that only 91 of the 1000 (9.1% overall) domains had the "-" character in the domain name, and only 1 keyword of the 100 had a top1 rank with a "-" character in the domain.

And domains with "-" in their domain tend to rank between 5-10 place, so the rate is even lower, because 68% of those 91 domain were in the 5-10 place.

Anyone any knowledge why google hates "-" character in domain name? as far as I knew google threats "-" as space, so for example the keyword "haircut berlin" should love the domain "haircut-berlin" (example didn't searched for this) but for all the 100 keyword, it does not seem to happen.

Other factors such as backlinks, DA/PR, age weren't so significant that it would produce 9:1 rate between no"-" and "-" domains.

Very interesting finding, and thanks for sharing it. Kinda leaves me speechless as I've never thought about it. Especially the part about nothing else producing the 9:1 ratio between dashed and non-dashed domains.

it is just a coincidence

It could be that very few domain names have dashes.

The provided data is statistically insignificant. I googled 3 keywords. All have hyphen in top 3.

I hate it when SEOs try to be mathematicians, data scientists and engineers all rolled into one. There's nothing wrong with having all these positions. Just try to make more reliable experiments and actually get good at it before you make conclusions.

I'll give people on this thread an opportunity to find hyphen on their keyboards within 2 seconds.
UK and US keyboards are different.
So here's your answer. Who would look for a hyphen?

Stitches and Burns said:

It could be that very few domain names have dashes.

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The only explanation I found for this, that domains with dash tends to be 30-40% younger than the non dashed ones, probably because if "haircutberlin" was taken they take "haircut-berlin" but this applies to half of the cases maybe, most of the times one name short names dominate. for this example keyword like "hairberlin" "berlinhair" and brand names

Don Goldstein said:

it is just a coincidence

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1000 website for 100 keywords, does not seems random to me.

Kontala said:

The provided data is statistically insignificant. I googled 3 keywords. All have hyphen in top 3.

I hate it when SEOs try to be mathematicians, data scientists and engineers all rolled into one. There's nothing wrong with having all these positions. Just try to make more reliable experiments and actually get good at it before you make conclusions.

Click to expand...

If you give me, 3 keywords that has 3 pages with hyphen in the top3 I would reconsider this whole database. Maybe for long tail keywords because of EDM, but for short keywords like "hair cut" "car clean" "painter" etc, it is the ratio I just said before.

praetserge said:

I'll give people on this thread to find hyphen on their keyboards within 2 seconds.
UK and US keyboards are different.
So here's your answer. Who would look for a hyphen?

Click to expand...

My research was based only on my local .de domains, but if google applies the "hyphen penalty" because of what you said globally to all domains, I can see this to be one of the reasons.

razharov said:

My research was based only on my local .de domains, but if google applies the "hyphen penalty" because of what you said globally to all domains, I can see this to be one of the reasons.

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I believe it's not a penalty per se.
I tend to use "forex trading" keyword as an example... so what domain would you take? forextrading.com or forex-trading.com?
I know what you'd take so you know the answer.

PS: I know where the hyphen key is... hate using it though.

praetserge said:

I tend to use "forex trading" keyword as an example... so what domain would you take? forextrading.com or forex-trading.com?
I know what you'd take so you know the answer.

Click to expand...

If the average iq would be 130+ then the forex-trading.com would been better, because its easier to read, because separated words are separated, but still I got what you say.

I think "-" are often used for exact match keyword domains. While one word domains are more likely to be branded domain names. Google is pushing branded domain names from my experience.

Oh I thought you were talking about "-" character in meta titles. Yes, using this character in domains isn’t good idea. Even in one of the recent rick and morty episodes, there was a funny scene about it.