I always enjoy doing an SEO experiment here on Blog Consulting. This experiment will actually follow the progress of some websites I am developing for a client. The experiment will attempt to determine if there is a measurable difference between using subdomain sites and sites built on URL’s with a hyphen. The actual experiment will be between miami.skydivingflorida.net (a subdomain site) and skydiving-miami.com (a site with a hyphen in the URL). I have had some success in the past using subdomains when I couldn’t find a decent URL to build a site on. I have stayed away from using domain names with hyphens in them, because somewhere along the line I had read that they had a negative impact on SEO (the reason for this is that there are a lot of spammy sites that are built on domain names with hyphens, however there are also a lot of excellent sites built on hyphenated domain names). Then I watched this video by Matt Cutts who is a lead Google engineer. Watch the short video below:

After watching the video, it looks to me like the hyphen in the domain name is not an issue, so it is a good time to run an experiment and see which type of site works best. I will be careful to build the sites on the same theme and point the same number of links at each site. I will also put the same amount of content on each site (not duplicate content), and I will link to both sites as Miami Skydiving and Skydiving Miami. If the site with the hyphen works for SEO, this will be very helpful when there are not good domain names available for building new sites in competitive keyword areas. I will be building these sites over the next few weeks and will start monitoring their progress. When I have some initial data I will post it here on Blog Consulting.