Hyphenated-Domains-Cost-You-Links?
We’ve been working on the SEO for our new cruise deals site, bonvoyage.co.uk .
When we bought this domain back in 2008 we knew there was a USA holiday specialist bon-voyage.co.uk based in Southampton, but we were happy to use the domain as it’s a very different vertical within travel.
Studying the backlinks for bonvoyage.co.uk we discovered that we had incoming links from various sites that were meant for the hyphenated site. Here’s a few examples -
thedibb.co.uk [2002]
cruisecritic.co.uk [2007]
timesonline.co.uk [2008]
mirror.co.uk [2010]
tripideas.co.uk [2011]
novascotia.com [unknown]
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a hyphenated domain is going to have these issues, it’s part of the reason they tend to be much cheaper. If anyone from bon-voyage.co.uk is reading this, you may want to drop a few emails and see if you can get any of the links corrected 
Actually, if you are from bon-voyage.co.uk you may also want to check out these pages *cough* -
http://www.bon-voyage.co.uk/page/site_map [3 links]
http://www.bon-voyage.co.uk/destinations/need_help_finding_somewhere [same 3 links]
If you do run a site on a hyphenated domain, short term maybe check the backlinks to the non-hyphenated version and make sure they’ve not picked up any of your links by accident! Long term maybe try and get your hands on the non-hyph version?
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4 Responses to “Hyphenated-Domains-Cost-You-Links?”
By George Marshall on Aug 24, 2011 | Reply
Funnily enough I have a number of back links to one of my sites that should be going to an industry body using a .org.uk – the links are to my .co.uk
By Chris on Aug 24, 2011 | Reply
Out of curiosity why don’t you make the most of the error pages being thrown up to your free inbound traffic (visitor or spdier) such as;
bonvoyage.co.uk/destinations/virginia_holidays/activity/the_blue_ridge_parkway
Surely it would be better to have a nice looking newsletter subcription page?
By Chris Clarkson on Aug 24, 2011 | Reply
@Chris – we’ll probably get them 301′d shortly, traffic from the links is nil (well until I posted them).
By Felipe on Aug 25, 2011 | Reply
That has never crossed my mind and I’ll keep it in mind for clients in the same situation. But I wouldn’t go around contacting people saying “Hey I have some links to my website that belong to yours, would you like it?” LOL