SEO Challenge who is right - Bagi or Temi Bagi and Temi are active members of UK Webmaster Forums, both are quite experienced webmasters, Bagi leans more towards search engine optimisation (SEO) aspects of webmastering more than Temi. In addition to running a directory called Directory of SEO Links, Bagi was the runner up in a Hungarian SEO competition in 2006. Temi is a webmaster with many years of experience, he run many websites including his personal blogs and offers SEO consultation services to small businesses in UK. He claims to always achieve page one raking for his clients. Bagi and Temi seem to disagree about whether hyphens make any difference to SERPs or how highly a site ranks for a particular keyword. Here is a personal statement from Bagi and Temi on this matter: Personal Statement from Bagi If you have a given website with a certain content having a related keyword rich domain name with hyphens you will achieve better rankings with same efforts. Temi's Personal Statement I do not believe hyphen, dashes or underscore affect how highly your site is listed on SERPs nor give you any advantages over a site or contents with no dashes, underscore or hyphen in its domain name or urls of other parts of the site. Quest to test Bagi and Temi's position empirically To find out which of the two guys is right, a small test was designed as follows: * two domains names registered, one with hyphen, one without * Domain name has no relevance what so ever with the contents of the site * Domain names hosted on the same IP address, same time * There will be no outgoing links from the sites * The page size on both domain will be the same * Same bolding tags and other formatting in the two sites will be kept the same. * Avoid putting same contents on both pages to avoid duplicate contents penalty * The same number of links from the same source will point to both sites The test was designed with suggestions from OWG and DKs . You can follow the discussions about this test at UK Webmaster Forums
