How long is too long for a domain?
 

Just looking for opinions on this :2 cents:

goodquestionyouhavethereIdontknowhowlongwouldbetoo longfora.com

That one :thumbsup

When you get to 5+ words or (4+ words if the length of them adds up to a lot, say 25+ characters) you really have to be getting something that gets searched a lot or is used a lot (a common/hip phrase or something).

I have been thinking about registering a 3 word domain that contains 20 characters. It is a searched phrase. I think it should be ok. Thanks for the input!

If you're looking for a brandable, memorable domain, then keep it short.

As far as seo traffic goes, I don't know if Google treats domains over a certain number of characters as likely spammy (as it appears to with names containing more than one hyphen). Also, like the guy said above, very few phrases with more than 3 words in them get search queried.

Anything over 10 characters is long in my book.

I never go over 3 generic words.

In my opinion a domain is never too long unless you're registering it for type-ins or to have a domains that's easy to remember. A shorter domain would be better for something like that. Besides that, the length is irrelevant. Of course, this is just my opinion and most people would disagree. haha

over 16 characters is too long

I would keep it under 255 characters so you can fit it into a mysql varchar field.

fourty two

Some good comments. I may go with the 20 char as it is only 3 words as well

Here's one which is 23 characters and seems to be doing ok.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/downfo...neorjustme.com

6 characters..

42 characters. The answer to the ultimate question.

less is more :thumbsup

personally 10 or less characters is ideal but my longest Non-adult domain is 36 characters and works well for me adult I have very few over 10 characters. I believe unless you get a great domain (in 12+ years I have only had 7 resellable domain names) the site is far more important than the name get them to come make them stay go to the pub

:thumbsup

It's cheap enough to buy a few domains and test it out. You'll figure it out soon enough.

If it can be easily said and remembered and spelled then I would use it no matter
how many characters.

Then, on another note; how many search engines survived with more than one word
domains?

Ideally:

<= 2 words
<= 10 characters (excluding TLD portion)

But there are exceptions. For example I have a 20 character, three word domain name (excluding the tld portion) which does well and is brandable.

i'd limit it to 3400 characters.

63 characters is the longest a domain could be, so I'll say, 62.5. :thumbsup

ding ding we have a winner.

Long versus short domain names have no effect on your search engine rankings, however if your going to do some SEO on that domain a longer domain with specific keywords in it is considered "vital" for a much smother SEO process.
63 (62 if a .info or a .mobi) character is the maximum number of allowed characters in a domain name as determined by ICANN.