Good day!

I have made the decision to purchase a domain for a website focused on women's interests, and I believe I have come across a suitable option: a domain with no prior history. I am curious to learn about the impact of using a hyphen or a number in the domain on the site's promotion.

How do search engines and other relevant platforms view domains that include hyphens or numbers? I recently heard an opinion suggesting that the inclusion of a hyphen or a number may have a negative influence. Does the use of a hyphen primarily affect readability and brand recognition, or could it have a broader impact?

Looking forward to your insights!

Domains that include hyphens or numbers may have different implications for SEO and overall site promotion. Let's start with hyphens. While search engines like Google can recognize and separate the words in a domain with hyphens, there are potential drawbacks. Firstly, domains with hyphens may be viewed as less professional and can be harder to communicate verbally. From a branding perspective, hyphens can make a domain name less memorable and may lead to user confusion.

Furthermore, search engines may not give the same weight to keywords separated by hyphens as they do to continuous keyword strings. This means that a domain without hyphens may have a slight advantage in terms of keyword relevance. However, it's essential to note that the impact of hyphens on SEO has become less significant over time, and search engines have improved their ability to understand and rank domains with hyphens.

On the other hand, domains with numbers can also present challenges. In some cases, numbers may cause confusion, especially if they can be spelled out in different ways (e.g., "4" vs. "four"). This ambiguity can affect brand recognition and make the domain harder to remember. From an SEO perspective, numbers in a domain can impact the clarity of the domain name and its relevance to search queries.
While using hyphens or numbers in a domain name may have some impact on SEO, readability, and brand recognition, it is crucial to prioritize user experience and brand clarity. Focus on choosing a domain that is easy to remember, relevant to your target audience, and aligns with your brand identity. Ultimately, the quality of content and user engagement will play a more significant role in your site's promotion than the presence of hyphens or numbers in the domain.

I used to register domain names with hyphens in between the words initially. Back then, I didn't consider purchasing non-hyphenated domains because I believed that combining two words without a hyphen was not a good idea.

However, the hyphenated domains I had taken were soon snatched up by the Gladenovs within a month, leaving me with their deficient duplicates. This experience made me reconsider my approach, and now I wouldn't even consider using two-part domain names, effectively eliminating the hyphen problem.

Do you ever ponder on the fact that non-hyphenated domains tend to be more expensive? There seems to be some significance in this observation, don't you think?

While it may not directly impact promotion, it does affect several components of a successful project. For example, user recall, brand perception, and overall user experience could be influenced by the choice of domain name.

Is there an evident excess in the length of the domain name (five-word+) in terms of letters and numbers? This principle extends to the titles of article URLs on the website as well (for instance).

Using three words plus a number in the domain name is considered reasonable.

As for hyphens, in my personal opinion, they may have a negative impact on English-language search results. However, I have observed that this doesn't seem to apply to search results. I cannot comment on how the Chinese and Germans fare in search rankings (as they also use hyphens).