Google Says Hyphens In Domain Names Not Considered Low Quality

Google’s John Mueller was asked if having hyphens in your domain name, like www.my-site-goes-here.com, can cause ranking issues in Google Search. John Mueller said no, domains with hyphens are not seen as low quality by Google algorithms.

Here are those tweets:

I’m tempted to answer something sarcastic, but no.

— John Mueller is watching out for Google+ 🐀 (@JohnMu) January 30, 2023

Now, the question came up likely because of the leaked Yandex Search source code. But it is not a new question.

In 2007, we covered the topic of having multiple hyphens in a domain name potentially triggering a Google SEO old myth named the hyphen filter. But when it comes to picking underscores or hyphens in your URLs, Google has said time and time again to go with hyphens over URLs because they are word separators.

While it may look spammy to have a ton of hyphens in your domain name, it probably won’t be downgraded in Google Search for just doing that.

Forum discussion at Twitter.