: Is it "acceptable" for a sub domain to be hyphenated? I am putting together a site for a portal. Some of the subdomains have rather long names and I am thinking that maybe I should use hyphens

@Eichhorn148

A subdomain is a domain part of a larger domain. It's connecting it to the "source" domain that makes it a sub-domain. There's nothing wrong with having example-site.com or exa-mple.site.com. I truly just wouldn't do this: example-example-site.com. That one, I'd avoid.

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@Nickens628

SEOmoz ranking database analysis have correlated hyphens in domains as negative factor.
Keyword match is good for search engines, short an memorable is good for user experience.
I would recommend using prefixes or sufixes.
Altmedicine or alternativemed could work.

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@Odierno851

As John said, there is nothing unacceptable about hyphens in subdomains although there are potential negative drawbacks from "excessive" hyphen usage.

However I wanted to advise against using hyphens as a solution to making "rather long names" more readable. I think adding a hyphen is just contributing to the overall problem of the URL being very long already, which makes it harder to remember, harder to type, etc. This is especially the case with subdomains because you already have a domain taking up URL characters. I recommend searching for an abbreviated subdomain if at all possible. For instance, in the example above, you could use altmed.mysite.com.

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@Kevin317

Hyphens in subdomains are just as acceptable as hyphens in domain names.

One suggested drawback to hyphens in domain names is that having too many (with "too many" being more then two) it will cause your site to be put in the sandbox or face some other kind of penalty for "looking spammy". There is no definitve information on this (that I know of) so whether it is true or not is up tp you to decide. In your example I would say you have nothing to worry about.

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