(Entry was posted by Madalen Ross on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 12/13/2018).

Use of hyphens in domain name correlates with spammy behavior

Hi I`m about to register two domains for a client. As they`re long names, made of three words, should I hyphenate the words? MOZ says that use of hyphens strongly correlates with spammy behavior and decreases domain name readability. Your thoughts?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Marc Spindel: I had two clients who had both positive and negative effects of using hyphens in the domain. All things equal not using it is better. But your niche might not be effected.
Madalen Ross: Niche is aviation - flight training
Marc Spindel: Looks extremely competitive. I would do more keyword research looking for anomalies that are slightly less competitive. It might not be possible though.
Zohaib Ali: Don`t hyphenate . It is not the norm and people would hardly remember or type ur url
Karina Singer: Depends on the biz name? Is it hyphenated? Would ppl recognize it as the brand? Are the other 3 words too clunky or in need of a hyphen ie. sugar-free,
power-driven, quick-thinking?
Madalen Ross: it would be the same as biz name which isn`t hyphenated. I could get away with one of them being memorable without a hyphen, the other I think one is too long - 29 characters.
Karina Singer: Madalen Ross Yea that`s a lot. why does it have to be so long? Is it a secret or can you say what it is?
Madalen Ross: He`s only just registered the biz and been spammed already to buy domain name at inflated price, but here goes. Australian Aeronautical Academy
Madalen Ross: I could use acronym - flyaaa
Karina Singer: auaeroacademy
Madalen Ross: you`re so clever!
Karina Singer: Madalen Ross I dont know I kinda like yours better. ðŸ˜Š
Madalen Ross: That`s one down! ðŸ˜€
Travis Bailey: I normally just type sexylocalsingles instead of sexy-local-singles. :D
Michael Martinez: Bing and Google do not care about how many hyphens you use in a URL. Virtually all blogs hyphenate their page/article URLs. Domain names are just URLs to the search engines (they don`t have some kind of "domain name spam" filter). We`ve used multi-hyphen domain names to great effect, because it`s not how many hyphens the URL contains that make a site spammy - it`s what you do with the site. But I also agree with Zohaib Ali in that it`s easier, in many cases, for people to remember a long domain name that doesn`t include hyphens.