Url with hypen or.co?
-
Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)?
Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co?
Thank you in advance!
-
Hi Joe, this is for sure an awesome question, so many different point of views, the problem I see with .co is this one:
"Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location."
Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399
So if I understand this correctly, and you want to target real estate clients in the Chicago area (which I love and will be there for the U2 concert on July 4th) and over US/worldwide, a .co domain is probably not the way to go here.
There has been a lot of talk about .co (TLD for Colombia), same as .ws, supposedly "WebSite", actually West Samoa, so I would advice to make the obvious, look at your competitors, does anyone has a .co domain and are ranking in Chicago? are any of the top 100 results anything but .com? try different keywords just to check if there are any .co sites ranking in the real estate market.
Hope that helps!
-
Thanks for the feedback. Thats the beauty of SEO. The only way to figure out what is the most effective is to try multiple ways and measure. Then, as soon as you get it and have a conclusion, the rules change...
-
At the risk of getting a bunch of thumbs down, between the choices you have specifically asked, I am going to throw in with the .co.
I think the issue is going to be how you promote the site, where you host it and where you get your links from.
If you host it in the USA and build a solid local link building campaign no one is going to have any trouble figuring out where you should be relevant. least of all the major search engines.
The other concern would be when someone tries to type in your url directly. However, There will be a tendency to automatically add an "m" to the end. But will that be any more of a problem then trying to get people to put a hyphen in the right place?
If people really find your site helpful, they'll just bookmark it in my experience.
-
Trust me when I say that I didn't think of the .co because of the Super Bowl ad.
I have heard mixed results on the .co but really haven't seen it in search results but I dont see to many hyphenated urls either. Maybe I will just add a word to the .com?
-
They had an ad in the superbowl, I've heard from 5 different clients about if they should buy the .co after that.
-
This link might help as well...
-
Completely disagree with you Korgo the average user doesn't even know there is a .co TLD that exists.
They have been available for a while, I spend a lot of time online through work and play and have never seen a site using one so not sure why you think they will take off if they haven't already despite virtually ever domain seller pushing them heavily last year.
-
I agree with James and would aim for one hyphen on the .com TLD. I did some unscientific user testing in this area and one hyphen was fine, 2 or more was a turn off for the user.
The same users expected a site to be .co.uk (I'm in the UK) or .com and some were confused by the existence of different TLD's wondering where the .co.uk or .com was and thinking the URL might not work without them.
-
I would pick hypenated over anything but .com. I would nt even use .net - .org is the only one I would consider for a true non-profit organisation.
I have some hyphenated domains for ecommerce websites, and have found no big problem with them personally. Of course go with non-hyphenated .com's if you can!
-
I don't like hyphens, but I don't like foreign domain extensions even more (Columbia!) despite what they say about it meaning "company", no, no. They pulled the same stunt with .me it's not on.
It depends how competitive the niche is and how much you want it. I have a feeling EMD won't be as strong in the coming months for long tail searches like this, but for now I guess it will give you the edge, what I'm trying to say is if you don't like the domain don't go with it, follow what you feel is most logical, as that is probably best for long term SEO success.The EMD benefit is nowhere near the same (in my exp) with hyphenated or foreign domains, don't get me wrong they are a benefit, but a .com, .org or net will always outrank (for now).
So in response to your question, If I was you I would buy them both (so comp. can't steal em' later), make them both blogs and get a nice brand-able domain for your business, use the two blogs as feeders for your business.
-
Thanks for your reply.
-
Thanks! I figured two hyphens wouldn't be a good idea but it's sure tempting.
-
According to the book The Art of SEO, my personal SEO bible, if you're not concerned with type-in-traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this. However to build a successful website long term you need to own the .com address and if you then want to use .co then the .com should redirect to it. According to the book, with the exception of the geeky, most people who use the web still assume that .com is all that's available or these are the domains that are most trustworthy. So don't lose traffic by having another address!
-
Hi Joe,
I wont go after 2 hyphens, usually if the .com is not available i go after a .net.
But in your case, i would go with a .co
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OfficeFurn0 -
What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
Hi mozzers, I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
URL tracking on offline material
Hi there, Hope someone can give some advice. We are doing some magazine advertising, the main purpose of the advert is to promote one of our new products, however the URL goes something like this: http://www.domain.com/products/new-product-libra-furniture/ which is just too long for anyone to remember, I think it should be simply domain.com/libra which redirects to the product page, however how can I track this in Google Analytics? if using a 301 that's impossible? Any advice would be grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Is it worth switching from underscores to hyphens in the URL?
I work for a website that recently did a redesign, and switched from hyphens to underscores. We have seen some drop in traffic, although that may be attributed to the migration. I have read that while Google prefers hyphens, the underscore problem is not as much of an issue as it used to be. Is it worth 301'ing the page to a version of itself with hyphens instead of underscores in the URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0