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Dashes versus Underscores in Your URL

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Use dashes instead of underscores in your URLsBack in 2008 in a post about best practices for URL structure, we alluded to our preference to separate words in URLs with dashes or hyphens instead of the very common;l used underscore. We wrote that underscores (www.domain.tld/red_widgets.htm) cause search engines to see the words in the page name as redwidgets, but if you use dashes (www.domain.tld/red-widgets.htm) the search engines recognize and index the two separate words, red and widgets.
Google has just released a video explaining the historical rationale for that, why it’s still true, and why it’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Watch the explanation by Google’s Matt Cutts.

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Protect Your Domain Name — A Cautionary Tale

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Two cautionary notes here about protecting your domain name.

Make Sure You Own Your Own Domain Name

Own your own domain nameThe first step to protect your domain name is to be listed as the Registrant (owner) of your domain name. Otherwise your business is at the mercy of someone else.

Case in point: a client of ours has had their domain name (roughly equal to their company name) for the past 3 years. They had the person who hosts their web site register it for them. Now that they’re thinking of moving to a different hosting service, they find they can’t access their domain to do that because they’re not the registrant.

Their web hosting company is the registrant.

Irritated to be losing a customer, the web hosting company wants a sizable monetary payment to relinquish ownership of the domain name — so much that our client feels the need to hire a lawyer and sue to get possession.

Not sure if you own your domain? Go to www.whois-search.com and enter your domain. You should be listed as both the Registrant and the Administrative Contact. If you’re not, ask whoever is listed as the registrant to make that change for you. Do it before you have any sort of falling out with them.

Don’t Let Your Domain Name Expire

The next danger you need to protect your domain name against is Domain Squatters or Cybersquatters. A client of ours had a compelling domain name and hadn’t started to use it yet, but it was the perfect domain name for his business. Sadly, he forgot to renew it one year. and the registrar he’d used neglected to tell him it was expiring. By the time he noticed, and wanted to use it for his website, he discovered that a cybersquatter had registered it themselves, and wanted a premium payment to give it up. Our client had to spend $2,000 just to get their domain name back.

Whoever you use as a domain registrar, always make sure they give you plenty of notice when it’s time to renew.

Don’t make either of these costly mistakes! Protect your domain name.

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5 Rules for Choosing a Domain Name

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We’ve had some fun in the past, pointing out “unfortunate” domain name choices. Clearly, having a good domain name is important for your business. For awhile it was the rage to create many web sites, with each domain name using a different keyword phrase for your business. Having  keywords in your domain name are substantially less helpful now.

How do you select a good domain name? Well, I have a modest list of rules that should guide you through the process.

  1. Make it easy to remember.
    You want people to return to your web site, right? They’re not going to search for you every time; they’ll just type it in. So keep it easy to remember.
  2. Make it hard to misspell.
    There are web sites out there with common misspellings of domain names, lurking either to download malware onto a user’s computer or to entice the user to click on a Google Ad.
  3. Choose a .com name for your business.
    If the domain name you want is already taken, it may be tempting to register the same domain name but with a .info or .biz extension instead. Most people, though will type in .com at the end out of sheer habit. That’s bad enough if the .com version is an unrelated website, but if the .com version points to a competitor, you’re sending customers to them.
  4. Avoid hyphens.
    People never quite remember whether to use the hyphen or not … or just where in your domain name the hyphen belongs.
  5. Finally, shorter is better than longer.
    You always want it to be as easy as possible for people to do business with you. Don’t make them type in a long, complicated domain name. First of all, that’s likely to cause you to violate rules 1 & 2, but also, you don’t want to make it more difficult than it has to be to enter your address in a browser’s address bar.

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That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

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You may realize that if you enter a URL like rankmagic.com into your browser you get to the same page as when you enter www.rankmagic.com. It doesn’t seem to matter which way you do it. But for the search engines, it can make a difference.

Background

WWW in URL

The WWW refers to the World Wide Web, which many people consider to be synonymous with the Internet. Technically, it’s not. The WWW runs on the internet like email, but is not the Internet itself. The “www” part of an Internet address isn’t usually required, though, so you normally can use it or not when typing a URL into the address bar of your browser.

Search Engine Implications

Search engines see addresses with and without the “www” as separate addresses. Why should that matter? Because link authority is an essential factor in good ranking and use of the “www” can affect your link popularity. Here’s how:

Suppose you have 100 links pointing to http://example.com and another hundred links pointing to http://www.example.com. Search engines will see that each URL has 100 inbound links, and that’s all you’ll get credit for. However, if they all pointed to http://www.example.com you’d get credit for all 200 links.

That Pesky “www” in Web Addresses

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It can actually be worse than that, as it’s possible to have four different URLS for your home page like this:

  1. example.com
  2. www.example.com
  3. example.com/index.html
  4. www.example.com/index.html

This problem of multiple addresses for the same web page is called canonicalization. We have a full discussion of it on our web site.

What To Do?

You can’t control how other people link to your site and whether they use the “www” in the address or not. But you can set up a permanent redirect so that any time they don’t use the “www”, the link gets directed to the “www” version of your web address. We have instructions on how to fix your home page canonical issues on our web site.

Aside from redirecting external links to the “www” version of your address, you should also make sure your internal links pointing to your home page do the same. It’s very common for home page links from other pages on your site to include the actual page, as in www.example.com/l (there are several possible alternatives to index.html that your site may use). You should make sure that  your own links to your home page don’t include that “index.html” part, and just point to www.example.com.

Read more about that pesky “www” and canonicalization here.

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Domain Name Registration

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Your domain registration expiration date may affect your search engine rankings.Your domain name registration tells the search engines something you may not realize.

Search engines are looking for reliable websites. They don’t want to give prominent listings to websites that may be “flash in the pan” websites that exist for a few months or a year and then go away. If you register your domain name for at least two or three years (you can go up to ten years at a time), the search engines may conclude that you are in business for the long haul and consider you eligible for higher rankings.

It’s also a good idea to renew your domain name registration before you get too close to the expiration date. We suggest renewing before your expiration date is a year away.

Google has mentioned this in a patent application, but we don’t know how much weight it carries. Whether other search engines look at this is only conjecture. Matt Cutts, “the Google Guy”, has downplayed the importance in a brief video.

We agree that this is probably of relatively little importance (certainly it’s less important than on-page content and incoming links) but it’s a relatively cheap and easy thing to address. At the very worst, it can’t hurt.