For what it's worth, I believe that Google has stated somewhere that more than one (or maybe 2 - I'd have to try to find the comment) hyphen may be interpreted as a negative signal for them.

One oter interesting thing to consider - take a look at the domain market. You'll notice that hyphenated domains tend to have far lower values these days. That's probably also a good indicator of which choice to make. I'd take the hyphen-less if you can.

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Hi,

Can you grab the source for this, would be very interested.

thanks

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Geansai Gorm | Web Design Ireland | Free CSS Menus | Canavan Disease

As far as I remember reading Richard it was more than 2. I think it might be somewhere on Webmasterworld.

I've never gone over 2 hyphens on domains but I wouldn't use them for a serious site. I think what its like trying to spell your full domain to a non webby person.

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Quite sure you'll find it in one of Matt Cutt's videos.
Sorry - you'll have to find that yourself though

That is interesting. I'll look into that.

yeah I'm looking at alternatives to try and get rid of the hyphen but one of the words is very popular (but I'm not really using it in the way that most use it) so I'm looking for other words that go well with it.

Ron Jackson is one SEO analyst who looks at hyphenated domain names and their ranking. This might be of interest: Monte talks to Matthew OBrien & Ron Jackson Hyphens and SEO are being studied quite a bit.

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http://photographedublin.blogspot.com/ http://moderntwist2.blogspot.com/ http://www.bbgardens.ie/

I've had no probs with my domains d-tour.ie or drop-d.ie both rank a healthy pr4 with practically no SEO to date.

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That's a brilliant find. Very interesting! Though I think its quite easy for experienced web users to associate a hyphen with a spam site and the article kind of reinforced that with me.

This is a bit interesting though:

I may as well share a tip for surfing that I worked out early on when I started using the Internet. Main search words that are obvious lead to the major, paid sites which can afford to have a high profile on the Net. Just add some banal adjective to your search, or something like a simple verb and you will access some of the best sites that are lesser known. e.g. I took and interest in the topic of "hypenated domain names". Searching for this brings up all the usual suspects. Add "snobbery", "clever", "I like", in fact, any ordinary phrase and you'll widen the search considerably. I'm sure a lot of people know this, but it's particularly useful when searching for sites in a foreign language... just throw in "je suis" if you'r interesting in French links.

Ive been thinking about the hyphenate issue a bit more. What is the percentage of hyphenated in relation to non-hyphenated web site names on the Web? What are the perceived advantages of hyphenated?