I just secured facebook.com/clairehawley as my profile url, as Facebook released this cool capability to give people an easy-to-remember url on Friday. What caught my eye, though, was that Facebook suggested I use claire.hawley or c.hawley. I have traditionally shied away from any sort of punctuation in domains and urls because it makes it more difficult to tell people what url to use. For SEO purposes in URLs I don’t need people to remember, I’ll use a hyphen to separate words, as it’s better than an underscore. However, I’ve never considered using a “dot”. I did some digging and found this older post on webmasterworld where g1smd concludes, “Yes. Avoid spaces and underscores in URLs. Always use hyphens or dots between words.” There you have it, dots work fine. I’m pretty sure there’s been no change to this, as I’ve mistakenly used dots successfully in URLs (eg. when a url is automatically generated from a title containing numbers like 2.25). However, I have seen that some crawler tools that don’t seem to like the dots.
I like to reserve dots for file types (.html) and domains (.com), so I will not be making the switch to use dots in place of hyphens. Unless I need someone to remember the url (clairehawley), I will continue to use hyphens; however, now I’m kicking myself for not trying to use claire.hawley on Facebook… maybe I’ll contact the other Claire Hawley’s and we can do an experiment to see if they’ll outrank me for a search for “Claire Hawley”.
Anyone else care to test this and share the results?
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
i did the same as you, no dashes or dots.
did u see the comment in that thread where the guy says google might not be the dominant search engine soon bc look at where altavista is ?
so much has changed since 2006.
Facebook sure picked a weird way to implement its username system. It skips right over any hyphens or dots you may have put in your username; in other words, they’re purely aesthetic. It doesn’t matter whether or not you type in http://www.facebook.com/clairehawley will take you to the same page as if you were to type in http://www.facebook.com/c….la—…ir.eha—wl…e..y—-…–.-.–
As far as I can tell, this is a specific to Facebook sort of deal; I tried removing the hyphens from this URL and got the infamous 404 error.
So it doesn’t matter that you didn’t get http://www.facebook.com/claire.hawley – technically, neither did anyone else. You can type in the dot if it makes you feel better, or if you want to give that address to other people, go right ahead.
As far as SEO goes, search engines seem to like to display users whose display names match their usernames first (as far as I can tell). Why? More content of the found page matches your search terms.
Thanks for sharing your crazy find, Michelle! So, I guess this means that if any of the other Claire Hawley’s in the world (there’s at least 3 more) decide to use a friendly-url username, they’re out of luck…. it’ll still go to me?
As far as I can tell, they won’t be able to get one with dashes or dots – they’ll have to start adding numbers or something if they still want their names to be included in the URL. : )
Facebook is now allowing 1 change of usernames. Go to:
https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php
..and click “change” next to Username.
I’m wondering the same question whether the dot is better for SEO. (Even though facebook.com/georgekao and facebook.com/george.kao will both go to the same profile, facebook will default to the one you set.)
I imagine using the dot makes it much easier for search engines to know they are separate words…so it should be better for SEO, right?
I’m not sure if anyone can help or has the same issue, but because facebook does not make a username unique if it has periods in it, it is still allowing multiple usernames to be created that are the SAME. I created a username for our business page, which facebook will not let us change, and when users type in the URL facebook.com/williamfwhite it is NOT going to our page, but to some guy’s personal page. We are screwed! I’ve tried emailing every address I can think of, posted questions, emailed facebook about this bug (the check availability feature should have known that williamfwhite was not available because of the other user’s username ‘william.f.white.”
Hi Mercedes,
I’ve heard of other people with this same problem! Best bet is to keep bugging and as a last resort, create a new profile and username… and let your fans know to find you at the new location.