Is a hyphen a problem?

Hubuk · 09-10-2006, 01:48 PM

Someone today told me that my site had no links to it which is why it only has a page rank of 5/10 compared to a smaller (same subject matter) site I had found which had a page rank of 7/10.

To find out what links both site had they had entered in the Google search box:

link:cookingforengineers.com
link:hub-uk.com

Cooking for Engineers showed 5,570 links whereas Hub-UK showed none. I know there are a lot of links to Hub-UK (has been going for over six years) and www.ranking.com (don't know how reliable or accurate it is) it tells me that Hub-UK has 4,255 links.

Does this mean that Google is penalising sites that have a hyphen in the domain name?

**D-A-L** · 09-10-2006, 02:25 PM

Hey David,

Good to hear from you again, hope the site is going well.

I am actually seeing 176 links for you here so there is not a problem there. Google is certainly not penalising hyphens in domain names. There are a huge amount of legitimate businesses using hypens in their domain names and this has no reason behind why your site would or would not rank in a certain way.

The key is to build more and more quality links with as many on-topic authority sites as you can. Maybe write a few articles with your link in the footer and offer them to other similar sites to publish.

Cheers

David

Hubuk · 09-10-2006, 02:50 PM

If I look at www.ranking.com (don't know how reliable or accurate it is) it tells me that Hub-UK has 4,255 links.

As an afterthought I decided to check cookingforengineers.com and find it has no links!

According to www.ranking.com:

cookingforengineers.com is ranked 149,076
Hub-UK is ranked 80,528.

(I am not bothered about where I rank against cookingforengineers.com, it is just a convenient benchmark.)

There seem to be so many misleading ways to gauge your site. What I am keen to do is improve my Google page rank as that dictates how much I get paid by certain subscribers to my site. I would obviously like to increase my visitor numbers as well but that should naturally happen if I can get a higher page rank.

Obviously page rank has nothing to do with the size of a site (mine is over 3,500 pages). I think age does get taken into consideration because I have seen some atrocious sites with little content that have a page rank of 5/10. So is it primarily links that dictate the site page rank with Google?