• The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Home Page
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• Redirecting Alternate Domains to Prevent Duplicate Content

This is a great checklist! I'm curious what you think about hyphenated domain names, i.e. battery-stuff.com if batterystuff.com is taken. It's getting harder to find sensible domain names that aren't already taken.

Posted by: SEO Diva on September 3, 2008

@ SEO Diva I'm not a fan of hyphenated domains unless you already own the non-hyphenated version. The reason for this is because it requires a whole lot of extra effort to "brand" that hyphen into someones mind. If you tell the m the domain name verbally there is a good chance they'll forget to add the hyphen by the time they get to a computer. Now you've just driven them to a competitor!

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on September 3, 2008

Matt Cutts has said for some time, hyphens and under-scores are treated the same way by Google.

Posted by: Markus Simms on September 3, 2008

I have a how-to on setting up a site so it redirects correctly (i.e. home page redirects and non-www to www). For apache servers only since it uses the htaccess file.

http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/howto/redirect-apache.htm

Doug

Posted by: Doug DePrenger on September 4, 2008

@ Markus but there is still the usability issue of it. Lots of reasons not to use underscores beyond search engines.

@ Doug Good tutorial. Here are a couple more:

http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/how-to-use-your-www-to-prevent-duplicate.php
http://www.searchengineguide.com/scott-allen/how-3-lines-of-code-can-improve-your-rankings.php

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on September 4, 2008

Wow. What a great post and a great checklist. I save it for future reference. Thanks for a great informative post :)

Posted by: Carlotta on September 4, 2008

Anyone who needs a keyword stuffed URL (domain name) to rank well is not really much of an SEO...

Brand trumps search engine rankings everyday that ends in Y and twice on Tuesdays!

htaccess should be modified to resolve to the absolute URL (http://www.) never the relatives.

Underscores rank at # 1 for highly competitive terms as well as hyphens....

Good advice on domain registration length...serves me well and always lets me beat competitors too cheap to extend.

Clean coding. Validated if possible.

Sites on their own servers located in the proper country will help as well.

Posted by: Clint Dixon on September 4, 2008

@ clint I'm not sure this article is necessarily geared toward SEOs but rather to business owners. Even still businesses get bad advice or partial information and believe something is true when it's not. Underscores are more of a usability issue than SEO. The world doesn't revolve around SEO. :) You've made some other really good points, though I'm not sure what you mean by "never the relatives" in regard to the .htaccess file.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on September 4, 2008

@Stoney says use hyphens not underscores
@markus says that Matt Cutts says hyphens andunderscores are trated the same by Google
@clint says URLs with underscores rank # 1 in Google

What matters to those wondering whether or not to use a hyphen or an underscore is.... what difference does it make? Answer that, please.

What Matt Cutts says is not always true. Go ahead and do searches with hyphens and underscores and see for yourself what someof the differences are.

The fact that URLs with underscores hold the #1 position is irrelevant... unless you can show that the underscore had anything to do with the ranking (or the lack of a hyhen, or whatever).

I say use hyphens as a word separator. As an experienced SEO I have plenty of good reasons for saying that. You, however, can do whatever you want.

Posted by: john andrews on September 6, 2008

Google has only recently gotten around to treating hyphens and underscores the same and last I heard Cutts said they were very close to being treated the same. But Google isn't the only engine to worry about.

The single best reason not to use underscores is for the usability reasons. Hyphens are easier to type in and to see in underlined links than underscores. It's simply a matter of making things easier for your visitors. Sure, if the link is clickable who cares, right? and that's fair enough, but good URLs should still be easier to type in.

Ultimately, it probably isn't worth this much of a debate.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on September 8, 2008

Thanks for the article!, So the number of years a domain name is register affects how Google and other see your website?

Posted by: directory on September 12, 2008

@ directory - it certainly can come into play when Google is determining whether your site is spam or comparing relative value. If you renew it year to year it shows you don't have much confidence in your longevity.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on September 15, 2008

Clean URL's, free from session ID's, department ID's etc

Posted by: Lindsay on September 19, 2008

Ah... one important point to remember. When buying up all those domains, 301 them to your marketed domain name.

www.battery-stuff.com and www.batterystuffs.com to www.batterystuff.com

Posted by: Robert on October 16, 2008

Hi, your last point ...to purchase multiple domains...is that for branding reasons or is there an SEO reason for that (I can't see how there would be).
Also, what about country domains for international companies? If they have .com, do they need .de, .co.uk, .fr etc?

Posted by: smonnes on December 2, 2008

@ smonnes - purchasing additional domains is smart mostly for reputation management, but it can also be done for branding reasons. There really are no SEO reasons for doing so.

If you are building sites targeting a specific region then it's best to get a domain with the proper domain extension.

Posted by: Stoney deGeyter on December 2, 2008