Like plural/ singular word forms, hyphenated terms also often pose a difficult SEO issues for us to solve – which version to use and optimize for: two-word, one-word or hyphenated one?
That question would be much easier to answer if Google demonstrated any definitive behavior when treating hyphenated terms; instead when using a hyphen in a search term, you will most likely see the mixture of hyphenated, single-word and two-word spelling variations. Thus I attempted to single out any types of patterns and ask you to also share your experience.
While the usage of a hyphen in compound words vary, grammatical rules that dictate the usage of the hyphen include:
- Differentiation between one-word, two-word or hyphenated variants is most often dictated by convention rather than fixed rules;
- Some prefixes (co-, pre-, mid-, de-, non-, anti-, etc.) are often hyphenated in British English and are often spelled as one word in American English;
- Compound verbs are usually hyphenated.
A few consistent search patterns I managed to sort out:
- hyphenated words are (generally) closer to two-word variant (Google just ignores the hyphen);
- hyphen doesn’t effect search results if one of the variant is grammatically correct (e.g. when hyphen means it’s a verb, search for hyphenated variant won’t return more verbal variants than for non-hyphenated ones);
- hyphenated words return all three variants: one-word, two-word and hyphenated ones;
- search results hyphenated words do not use bolding for stemming results (compare: [air-condition] and [air condition] and [aircondition]);
- two-word variants (or more correct per Google’s opinion) are more likely to be proceeded and followed by related terms suggested by Google;
- two-word and hyphenated variants tend to return more results even if one-word variant is considered to be proper use;
- top result is usually the same for all three variants.
Other points to note:
- Google trends tool treats all the three variants differently, so you can use it to differentiate between popular terms: [pre-school vs preschool vs pre school]
A few sample searches I analyzed:
| one word | two words | hyphenated words | |
|
case?sensitive (hyphenated variant is considered to be "proper use" but two-word spelling is also correct) |
grammatically incorrect (Google suggests two-word variant) | first page results are almost identical | |
| ~12,300,000 results | ~7,670,000 results | ||
| includes "related searches" | doesn’t bold stemming results (‘case sensitivity‘) | ||
|
web?page (two-word variant is traditionally the correct one; though neither of them can be considered gramatically incorrect) |
first result is the same | ||
| results include both one-word and two-word versions. | more emphasis on the word ‘web‘. | results include both one-word and two-word versions. | |
| includes "related searches" | |||
| ~ 39,000,000 results | ~ 278,000,000 results | ~ 112,000,000 results | |
|
pre?school (British English tends towards hyphenation while American English tends towards single-word spelling) |
~ 2,790,000 results | grammatically incorrect (Google suggests one-word variant) | ~ 36,400,000 results |
| includes "related searches" | |||
|
tittle?tattle (hyphenated variant is proper use but all three variants are correct) |
~ 7,910 results | ~ 198,000 results | ~ 200,000 results |
| returns both single-word and hyphenated variants but bolds only single-word spelling | returns only few two-word results, most of the results list hyphenated words | returns almost identical results to two-word variants | |
|
air?condition (verbs use hyphenated variant, nouns generally consist of two words though single-word variant is also correct) |
~ 2,340,000 results | ~ 6,980,000 results | ~ 3,390,000 results |
| includes "related searches" | |||
| shopping results at #11 | shopping results at #1 | shopping results at #11 | |
