Just wanted to make a quick post about recent observations when purchasing a domain name.

As part of this year’s 30 Day Challenge with Ed Dale and co. I registered an additional 2 domain names for a backup niche. Both consist of two words, but one is word1word2.net while the other is word1-word.com.

This came about because of the whole .com is worth more (not that I’d dabbled much in selling domains and websites) and as the hyphenated version was considered acceptable, albeit down the pecking chain after word1word2.net/org and word1word2word3.com/net/org.

I decided to go live with word1-word2.com live at the end of the first week of August with a single post. It didn’t rank. A week and a half later, I made word1word2.net live with a newly written post. I also submitted an ezine article which went live 2 days later. I don’t remember how long precisely it took other than it being within a few short days that the .net site ranked.

Interestingly, some lazy twit also stumbled upon this niche, most likely also a 30DCer in that they used a WordPress blog with full on page SEO – and that this blog coincidentally appeared in the month of the challenge. Anyway the twit copied my post from my .net and posted it verbatim on its blog.

There’s a slight irony here in that the keyphrase is actually worthless. The google keyword stats said there was a lot of traffic, but that traffic certainly doesn’t appear to be search traffic as despite the high page 1 ranking of my .net, it’s lucky if the site pulls even 1 organic search visitor a day.

Anyway the point I wanted to make here is that the domain name was word1word2word3.com. The blog currently ranks on page 4 for the main keyphrase and is less than 10 days old. As a case study I’m going to track it, as of course there’s also this issue of duplicate content. It would appear that for the time being at least, google doesn’t attach that much weight to it being a copy as it does being a new blog incorporating the keyphrase into its domain name.

My hyphenated .com meanwhile ranks in the mid 400s. In light of the evidence and that this project was the first and never ranked in the 100s for broad match,  it appears that google starts off in a position of mistrust for a domain that incorporates a hyphen.

So this has all been very educational. I’ve learnt two things:

1. Hyphens really are to be used as the last resort, don’t be surprised if you are held back in the rankings if you start off a project using them in your domain name – even if it is only one.
2. Duplicate content is not that big of an issue, at least not as first – perhaps it also depends on exactly how many pages of duplicate content google detects amongst unique content.