The discussion centers around the suitability of having dashes in a domain name. The original poster, meglio, is considering ukrainians-au.com due to registration restrictions and wonders if the dash will negatively impact the domain’s quality.
meglio and vinothkannans agree that dashes are harmless unless used twice. However, vinothkannans suggests choosing the hyphenless version (ukrainiansau.com) when available, as people are accustomed to it.
meglio expresses concern that a hyphenless domain name might be confusing, while vinothkannans believes it won’t be a problem and that a clear logo can help clarify the domain’s meaning.
notriddle advises registering both versions of the domain name (with and without a hyphen) to avoid phishing and suggests using the version with a hyphen as the primary domain for better readability.
I need a URL for Ukrainians in Australia. Because I’m not a registered organisation, I can’t pick .com.au, so I’ll have to include the au portion in the URL. If it goes well, I can always migrate later to a proper URL.
Is something like ukrainians-au.com really bad idea? I read many times that dashes in URL degrade the quality of the domain in the eyes of both search engines and people.
I researched about this in the past. AFAIK using hyphens are harmless unless you use it twice like ukrainians--au.com (scammers way). It won’t degrade the quality of a domain name.
But if both ukrainiansau.com and ukrainians-au.com are available then I will choose ukrainiansau.com. Because people already get used to use hyphenless domain names (not because of SEO).
Thanks for sharing your experience.
Won’t people tend to try read ukrainiansau as a single word, which makes little to no sense? It looks a bit weird, that’s why I’m concerned about the hyphenless version of the domain name.
It won’t be a problem particularly in domain names. It will make less sense unless they visit the URL. But after that they will know and understand what it really means.
If your logo reflected it by displaying what it really means then it can be more helpful.
Anyway it is your personal choice too. travis-ci.org and circleci.com
If you want to use a multi-word domain name, then you should register both with and without the hyphen. Use the version with the hyphen as your primary domain (since that version is more readable) but keep the version without the hyphen to avoid someone else taking it and using it for phishing.
For example, travisci.org