Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
-
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html
I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized?
If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title?
If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true?
Thanks mozzers!
-
John Mueller from Google has mentioned that there is no penalty or demotion for using a hyphen. However, be careful you're not keyword stuffing.
-
In that example, there is not a hyphen in the domain name, only in the page name. A hyphen in the domain name would look like:
-
You can use either. Google looks at hyphens like a space. I think it makes more sense to use piping (|) for your page titles, as that is more common, although I don't think there is a penalty for either. Below is a link to Matt Cutts blog for using different punctuation in URLs, I would imagine the same applys to page titles.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
and from the webmaster tools blog:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/cBikmAXlXXoHope this helps! I would worry more about the structure and keywords than the separator characters.
-
I would say use hyphens in the urls. I've never known there to be a ranking difference and in my opinion it's a best practice to use hyphens over underscores or plus symbols, and for readability for the user I think hyphens make sense. texas-plumbers reads easier than texasplumbers to a user, and for Google I would think it's easier to discern. Imagine some titles where words could make completely different sentences by separating them at different locations. http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/ as some examples.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Lots of Listing Pages with Thin Content on Real Estate Web Site-Best to Set them to No-Index?
Greetings Moz Community: As a commercial real estate broker in Manhattan I run a web site with over 600 pages. Basically the pages are organized in the following categories: 1. Neighborhoods (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/neighborhoods/midtown-manhattan) 25 PAGES Low bounce rate 2. Types of Space (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/loft-space)
Web Design | | Kingalan1
15 PAGES Low bounce rate. 3. Blog (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/blog/how-long-does-leasing-process-take
30 PAGES Medium/high bounce rate 4. Services (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/brokerage-services/relocate-to-new-office-space) High bounce rate
3 PAGES 5. About Us (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/about-us/what-we-do
4 PAGES High bounce rate 6. Listings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf)
300 PAGES High bounce rate (65%), thin content 7. Buildings (Example:http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/928-broadway
300 PAGES Very high bounce rate (exceeding 75%) Most of the listing pages do not have more than 100 words. My SEO firm is advising me to set them "No-Index, Follow". They believe the thin content could be hurting me. Is this an acceptable strategy? I am concerned that when Google detects 300 pages set to "No-Follow" they could interpret this as the site seeking to hide something and penalize us. Also, the building pages have a low click thru rate. Would it make sense to set them to "No-Follow" as well? Basically, would it increase authority in Google's eyes if we set pages that have thin content and/or low click thru rates to "No-Follow"? Any harm in doing this for about half the pages on the site? I might add that while I don't suffer from any manual penalty volume has gone down substantially in the last month. We upgraded the site in early June and somehow 175 pages were submitted to Google that should not have been indexed. A removal request has been made for those pages. Prior to that we were hit by Panda in April 2012 with search volume dropping from about 7,000 per month to 3,000 per month. Volume had increased back to 4,500 by April this year only to start tanking again. It was down to 3,600 in June. About 30 toxic links were removed in late April and a disavow file was submitted with Google in late April for removal of links from 80 toxic domains. Thanks in advance for your responses!! Alan0 -
How to make sure category pages rank higher than product pages?
Hi, This question is E-Commerce related. We have product categories dividing products by color. Let's say we have the category 'blue toy cars' and a product called 'blue toy car racer', both of these could rank for the keyword 'blue toy car'. How do we make sure the category 'blue toy cars' ranks above the product 'blue toy car racer'? Or is the category page automatically ranked higher because of the higher page authority of that page? Alex
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
Using H tags and its maximum Limits
hi..
Web Design | | funclub247
I want to Know what is a Maximum limit of using H tags in One Page : for Eg : I Know That I Can use Only One H1 Tag per Page, What about Other H tag Limit..
h1 - 1 time Maximum
h2 - ..?
h3 - ..?
h4 - ..?
h5 - ..?
h6 - ..?
h7 - ..?
.....
i want to target more than 30 key word using H tag as a header of the paragraph...1 -
What else should you call the Home page?
In the menu bar and footer the main page is called Home. Would it confuse people to rename it to Business Name Home or Business Name? How do you handle this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Google also indexed trailing slash version - PLEASE HELP
Hi Guys, We redesigned the website and somehow our canonical extension decided to add a trailing slash to all URLs. Previously our canonical URLs didn't have a trailing slash. During the redesign we haven't changed the URLs. They remained same but we have now two versions indexed. One with trailing slash one without. I've now fixed the issue and removed the the trailing slash from canonical URLs. Is this the correct way of fixing it? Will our rankings be effected in a negative way? Is there anything else I need to do. The website went live last Tuesday. Thanks
Web Design | | Jvalops0 -
Should I use the google mod_pagespeed in my apache server?
Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
Web Design | | Naghirniac0