Hyphen in Blog URL - Good or Bad?

In a 3 year old post How to build traffic to your blog, I have mentioned that it is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to include key words in the blog URL and that search engines cannot distinguish between words in a compound word like for example
http://bloggerfordummies.blogspot.com.

This I learned from WebCEO. I got to thank a reader whose blog is Inside that ad who asked about changing the blog URL to include hyphen whose motivation to change was that old post. I am grateful that he has drawn my attention to that post which reminded me that I need to do an update on that post. I got to state here that what WebCEO taught is not true because you can try to google, for example, blogger for dummies, and you will see in the results page that the 3 words are highlighted (bold). this showed that search engines can separate out words in words combined into a single compound word. Thus if you have something in your current URL similar to bloggerfordummies, do not try to change the blog URL especially if it is an old blog as you will get dead links and will have to start all over again. I for one will only change to something like blogger-for-dummies only if bloggerfordummies had already been taken but I still want the words blogger and dummies in the blog URL.

One further thing. There are people who said that 1 or 2 hyphens may be OK but more than that, the URL becomes spammy.

Effect of Custom Domain on Traffick and PageRank

As you know, Blogger has introduced custom domain whereby you can register your own domain name and use it for your blog instead of the sub-domain of blogspot.com. Some may be deterred from using custom domain because it involves a change of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and PageRank of the blog reduced to being not ranked, both which may reduce the traffic to the blog.

Last year I finally decided to make the leap and convert one of my less traffic blog, http://dummies-guide-to-google-blogger.blogspot.com/ to custom domain, namely http://www.blogger-book.com/.

Regarding PageRank, it did get downgraded from a PageRank of 4 to being not ranked at all. However, the PageRank of Blogger book has now increased to PageRank 1 and is expected to increase as time goes by. The best of all is, it appear that PageRank is not that crucial to getting hits (traffic) as the conversion to custom domain, despite the PageRank downgrad, did not decrease. In fact, from an average of 3020 unique visitors per month from the month of January to October (before conversion), the number of unique visitors have increased to 3976, an increase of 32% (see screen shot below):

However, before I convert, I saved all the permalink prior to conversion to custom domain to test whether the old permalink will be redirected to the new custom domain permalink. I am happy to report that all the old permalink is being effortlessly redirected to the new custom domain permalink (individual post URL).



Update: A blogger has complained that after conversion, traffic went down to almost zero. It turned out that the blogger registered the domain direct from Godaddy. In my case, I registered using Google Apps via SETTINGS > PUBLISHING, paid for the registration and did the conversion to custom domain all within Blogger, never directly through Godaddy. Looks like most of those bloggers experiencing problems with custom domain did it via Godaddy.

If you are the person who has been in the world of blogging, of course there already know what it is and what function backlink from backlink tersebut.Jika you do not get what it is backlink, I'll give a little explanation:

Backlink is a link from another blog to the our blog.So what backlink benefit from:

Position
1.Meningkatkan blog / website in our search engine

2.Menigkatkan traffic

3.Meningkatkan PageRank

4.Sarana mandatory in order to blog you'd like to receive in the program paid review


Nah tips and tricks on the blog this time, I'd like to share about the tools you can use to check the number of backlink you can visit cepat.Anda with backlinkwatch.com.Anda only enter the address of your blog, right click on Check your backlink.