12-30-2006, 04:24 PM
agent_orange Wrote:I want to buy a domain for my favorite basketball player. The .com and .net are already taken. I'm thinking of buying a hyphenated domain instead of buying the .org and .info. Do you think the hyphenated domains is a better idea?
By the way, I'm not buying the domain for revenue. I just want to try my website building skills and I want to get a search engine rank.
As far as domain value goes, hyphens lower value.
The top 3 extensions, in order from most valuable to least valuable are: .com, .net, .org... and the .info comes in somewhere 4th-8th place.
So, I would probably go for the .org instead of hyphenating the .com.
On the other hand... value isn't concretely fixed. So although an appraisal company might devalue hyphenated domains MORE than they devalue .org extensions, the appraisal might not be accurate. Some people might prefer a .com in any case, even with a hyphen.
Personally, I would get the .org because I agree with the posts above in that users prefer to type .org than to type hyphens. I have a .org celeb domain that gets about 80 type ins a month, and it's not even only the celeb's name (it actually consists of Celebname+Otherword+.org). I am pretty sure that the hyphenated version gets less traffic.
In terms of SEO, there is a lot of debate about the impact of hyphens. I think that in general, the smaller search engines are helped by hyphens. For the larger ones, it dosen't matter. Since you will get most of your traffic from Google and Yahoo (I hope), using hyphens and not using them should amount to the same.