Would like opinions on domain name format

I have been planning a site for a while now and have been going back and forth with ideas on domain names.

Do you think it would be better to have a domain name like:

thesomethingsomething

or

something-something

?

I am working on getting somethingsomething but it is registered with cw and just redirects. I'm trying to think about the best approach to aquire it but as a backup plan I would like to make a decision on the former 2.



Any opinions?

Matt from Google has a video blog on this. They way he explains it, that the dash does not affect any seo or is penalized for using a dash. It looks better visually to seperate words IMO

hmm.. really..
Thanks for the reply.

By the way I just discovered that there is a domain subforum in the white hat forum. I didn't know about it when I made this post. the question may belong in that forum rather than this one.

I believe this is the article that ericbthe1 was referring to, in case someone else was interested.


hisblogsite /blog/dashes-vs-underscores/


It compares underscores vs dashes, which does help. What about all one word names with "the" in it? Does that matter? If I use a name like appleflorescent is that better or worse than apple-florescent? According to the article apple_florescent would have to be searched using the entire string whereas apple-florescent would not. How is it for appleflorescent or theappleflorescent?

I am a bit unclear on this.

anyone?

Matt's discussion of the dashes vs underscores was really about the rest of the URL, not domain names (you can't have underscores in a domain name anyway). And they changed the underscores so that they work exactly the same as dashes several years ago.


For an EMD domain name, the closer to the exact match the better,
You can calculate EMD as a %.
so in your example :
thesomethingsomething = EMD + 3 characters = 18/21 = 85%
something-something = EMD + 1 character = 18/19 = 94%


Also, when you have to add characters to the EMD, add them to the end, rather than the beginning - the earlier a word appears, the more important it is.

a lot of people don't like the look of dashes and they are hard to say, but it's not a big deal of you are only looking for online traffic and no word of mouth traffic. My personal experience is that they work fine, but don't use more than 1 in a domain name.

That said, EMDs are likely to be less important in the future. Pick the name that you think will hold up best over the long term - if the EMD benefit was gone tomorrow, which one do you think you'd choose?

Most importantly, just pick one and move on, don't let this hang up your project, best of luck!

Great advice. Thank you!

I've seen google bold the keywords in search results for domain names where there is a dash between the keywords, so in my opinion, the dash is the way to go.