Does Having Dashes In Your Domain Rank Higher?

by Jon Ricerca

This question is debated hotly in many SEO (Search
Engine Optimization) forums. The answer, like so many
others can be easily obtained by performing a statistical
analysis of the actual results from the leading search
engine. This article presents the results of such an
analysis.

I used the following methodology to answer this question.
I gathered the results of the queries I naturally
performed last month using the leading search engine and
analyzed them. I then counted the number of listings that
had at least one dash in the domain vs. those that didn't
have any dashes. This data was tabulated against the
ranking for the first 8 search engine listings.

Here is the graph:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dag02.jpg (Note
to webmasters: You have permission to hot-link to the
graph, text link to it, or even copy it to your own
site)

The X-axis shows the ranking from 1 through 8 on the
leading search engine. The Y-axis shows the number of
domains that contained dashes. There is no obvious
correlation, which indicates that domains containing
dashes are generally equally distributed. They are
neither more likely to be ranked higher, nor lower.

There is an odd result for the first three positions,
which I suspect is merely a statistical quirk. I
generally look for an overall coorelation (scale: -100 to
+100) of above +33 or below -33 to consider something
statistically significant using the amount of data I
studied. The ranking correlation in this case was -21.
The fact is that the leading search engine, on average,
did rank domains containing dashes slightly lower than
domains that did not contain dashes, but not significantly
so.

Note:

For the purposes of this test, only the domain portion of
the URL was studied. Dashes present in the rest of the URL
were not counted as domains with dashes if the domain
itself did not contain any dashes.

Conclusion:

When looking at the first 8 positions, the leading search
engine ranks domains containing dashes slightly lower in
the data we studied, however the correlation is not solid
enough to be significant. This is merely a correlation
study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether
the leading search engine purposefully entertains this
factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant
from the factor we studied, but the end result is that
this search engine does, in fact, rank domains containing
dashes slightly lower than domains containing no dashes.

Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors
of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at
SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF
reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com