Just a quick question: I read, that it's better to leave hyphens out to get a domain name thats easier to remember. However wouldn't it be worth the few bucks extra to register the name with and the one without a hyphen (assuming its a 2 word domain), to get that little edge of enabling the SEs to read the keywords in the domain name...or does it not matter at all?

I also read googles algorithm had changed so they placed more emphasis on keywords in the domain names (or is this only true for anchor text)?

Which I did for HighConversions.com and High-Conversions.com, but I only use the one without the hyphen.

Keywords in domains are definitely valued, but I don't know how much weight they carry. It probably depends on the subject matter as well.

I believe the hypens you're talking about are to seperate words in page names, such as 'my-new-page' as apposed to 'mynewpage' or 'my_new_page'. Do you follow?

Yes, that's what I mean. I read somewhere, that keywords in the URL were only valued if they were seperated by hyphens, otherwise the SEs (or maybe it was just google) didnt see them as actual keywords.

However, I also read keywords in the domain name weren't all that important (but hey you're trying to get every little edge you can, right?;-)).

Then again, the one without the hyphen will always look more professional, so I guess, it really depends whether it's to be a business site, that offers services or just an informational site.

So anyways, I thought it might be a good idea to get a domain name with and one w/o the hyphen and point a link from the hyphenless domain to the one with the hyphen - just in case people tend to forget there was a hyphen in the name.

Why did you register those 2 domains, but only use one? For the same purpose I have in mind or just to not let competition get the other domain name and possibly take away some of your traffic/clients? or some other purpose?

Hi,

Google has recently changed their policies, and they now penalize for hyphens. I know this is true about the domain itself, but I'm not sure if this is true about page names.

The SE logic is smart enough now that it can recognize keywords without the hyphens, as long as your keywords couldn't be interpreted as different words.

I have a site with 3 hyphens, and Google has been indexing it for almost a year. I'm still waiting for any page other than the homepage to show up. This may be why. I'm going to move it under a different domain without hyphens and see what happens.

Google would not 'penalize' a site for using hyphens over underscores, period!

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer, blogged about this some time ago!
Dashes - Underscores (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores)

Hi,

Sorry, I disagree. I don't want to start a huge thread here because there are a lot of threads on this very subject on other forums. However...

My understanding is that this is a new development. I read another thread (that I have been desperately trying to find again, but can't) where someone posted that they were told by Google itself that it now sees 1 hyphen as legit, but anything more sends up flags.

This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of site with more than 1 hyphen which don't have any problems. If you're already an established site, have lots of incoming links, etc. Google knows you're legit. But all things being equal, if you have a new site with lots of hyphens, Google gets suspicious if you have more than 1 hyphen.

I recently went to a weekend seminar put on by the Internet Marketing Center. These guys seem to really know their stuff. They confirmed that as of late, Google frowns on hyphens. They said if you already have a domain with hyphens, don't worry about it, but if you're buying a new one, don't get hyphens.

I'd like to know if anyone out there has a definitive answer on this from Google itself, not from opinion.

My understanding is that this is a new development. I read another thread (that I have been desperately trying to find again, but can't) where someone posted that they were told by Google itself that it now sees 1 hyphen as legit, but anything more sends up flags.

This sounds more like ancient history... the kind of discussion you might have encountered years ago... not a recent development. That said, yes, all the engines have noticed that there's a big correlation between the number of hyphens in a domain name and the intent to spam.

My guess is that a lot of hyphens in the domain name might hurt you in a couple of ways...

a) it may raise flags, and the engines might watch you more carefully. It might even lower your quality score in any sort of statistical analysis that the engines might apply to your site. If you're clean in other ways, this shouldn't hurt you.

b) it also, though, potentially decreases the diversity of vocabulary in the anchor text of inbound links, and this could hurt you too. My feeling has always been that the major boost of keywords in a domain name comes from their use in your company name, not from the domain link itself. The company name is often the default anchor text you can expect on inbound links. I also find that somewhere between 10-20% of my clients' unsolicited inbound links tend to have the domain name as the anchor text. This latter is where those hyphens might hurt....

If you have a "Keyword Keyword Keyword" site or company name, then there's not much variation when you get a kwd1-kwd2-kwd3.com (domain name as anchor) inbound. A kwd1kwd2kwd3.com inbound actually provides some variant of the "Kwd1 Kwd2 Kwd3" company name, and this variation might end up helping you even more than it costs you some extra boost.

As for hyphens in page urls, I think that the possible boost of the separated words in the filename is likely to be insignificant, but it's unlikely that they'll hurt you. When Matt Cutts started using hyphens in his blog page filenames and then gave reasons why they were preferable to underscores, it was a strong signal that they probably didn't matter much for SEO.