word1-word2 waste of $$?

huh?

[swervedrivers]

growingdigital -

This is my first post here, and already I'm worrying about offending people! :o) I do NOT mean to imply that since what you said doesn't add up in my tiny mind, you are wrong. I mean ONLY that I just don't get it! :o) In other words (quoting Pulp Fiction): "Man, I don't EVEN have an opinion!"

Right. You said: "...there is no empirical evidence that a domain with hyphens will rank better than one without, all things being equal."

Do you mean ONLY exactly what you said, or are you implying you think there IS no difference? I don't know either way, but this issue concerns me because my business associate and I just bought a bunch of "word1-word2" domain names and we would now like to hear opinions regarding how stupid this was ... considering that we already owned the word1word2 names! :o)

In my VERY limited knowledge, the only conclusion or conclusions I can draw from what you said are (1) SEs ignore domain names or (2) SEs can see words inside bigger words in domain names (like "ass" in "assume). And in my very limited knowledge I understand both of these to be false.

Or maybe what you meant was, since there's no empirical evidence, it might make a difference but not enough to care about. :o)

Just wondering. :o)

[submitx]

Google penalizes domains with 3 or more dashes. Other than that there is no real benefit in having dashses or not. Keyword in a domain might be less than 1% of ranking factor..you will see much more ranking benefit from content and link popularity, so don't worry about the dash and if you get domain with dash, then get the one without the dash to just in case someone types without dash, so might be cheaper if you get the domain without the dash, so you don't have to get both versions.

[swervedrivers]

submitx - gotcha. Thanks very much for the help.

[Spine]

Submitx, are you sure that Google penalizes sites with 3 or more hyphens in the domain? I have a site with 3 that had done well for 4 years until September, now it's doing very badly.

I asked google in a letter (about other things) if this was the problem, and they just said my site was suffering because of normal index fluctuations etc, but I don't know if I believe them.

[brizad]

Sorry to raise the dead but this statement intrigues me...

Google penalizes domains with 3 or more dashes.

What is the evidence of this? I have never even heard this mentioned before on webmasterworld or elsewhere.

It doesn't seem possible to me, especially considering that as time goes on there will be less and less allthewordstogether.coms available. It seems that the need for/usage of dashes-in-domains.com would be increasing.