# SEO Question



## codyjoe (May 6, 2013)

I've been trying to discern if there's truly any difference between the following search terms.

Custom T-Shirts
Custom T Shirts

I'm assuming that search engines don't see the difference between either of the terms since most links are read as "mywebsite.com/custom-t-shirts" but what confuses me is that when you research some of the top sites in the screen printing field. You'll find some ranking on key-terms with the "-" in their terms while others rank without it. Does it really make a difference or not whether you use a hyphen?


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## GordonM (May 21, 2012)

Dashes and underscores in page, directory, and sub-domain names generally don't make a difference. As tshirts isn't as humanly readable as t-shirts, you might opt for the latter if you can only use it once. I use variations in the text, titles, page names, and main headings to give broader scope for the SEs: tees, tee shirts, t-shirts, tshirts, t shirts, etc. These are used individually, and never in a way the SEs would consider to be "stuffed."

Don't judge ranking just on keywords. Both Google and Bing give the biggest rank to *quality* backlinks -- where links TO the site come from. More often than not, sites in the top two pages of a common search term have a healthy number of backlinks from trusted (non link-farm, etc.) sites.


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## codyjoe (May 6, 2013)

That's very strange then seeing how some sites are ranked for keyterms specifically using "t-shirts" while others are using "t shirts". Anyways, thanks for the info.


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## Tubalcain (Nov 7, 2013)

This is a good question and I might have a partial answer based on our experience. We wrote our entire web site using the term "t shirt" (no hyphen). After 2 months and keeping an eye on it in google webmaster tools, we started ranking for "shirt" and the variation "shirt*s*". "T", with or without hyphen was nowhere to be found in our keyword density list. It's like google totally ignored the standalone letter (T).

So that leads me to think that google does give some preference to having the hyphen in there. As in "t-shirts". So we went through our entire site a couple of days ago and changed all instances of "t shirt" to "t-shirt". In the beginning we assumed the hyphen didn't matter.

Google has been crawling our site almost religiously every seven days. So I should know the effects of this change on about 11/10/13.

To answer your question though, rankings are driven by a lot more that keywords, titles and other surface tweaks. What really matters most is the amount of content you have and how well you have established yourself as the authority in something. Authority is driven mostly by links to your site from relevant sites.

An authority might be something like "aqua-man t-shirts" where there would be fewer authorities than something generic like "t-shirts". It could takes years to get traction with a generic term like that.

So don't get too hung up on these word nuances and focus on generating good, useful, unique content for your site's users in the beginning. Variations on words is really a fine tuning thing you'll want to do later once established.


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## ourbusinessladde (Jan 7, 2015)

Generally there is no difference in Dashes and underscores in page


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