For example,
Hyphenated: 1stword-2ndword.com
Unphyphenated: 2ndword1stword.com
I would imagine that the hyphenated version would get more hits because the words are in order, but I just didn't know if for some reason, adding the hyphen would decrease my rankings in search engines.
Thank you very much for your help!
[edited by: Webwork at 5:16 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
[edit reason] Charter [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
My view is that domains are cheap enough. Therefore, get both and redirect the hyphenated domain to the non-hyphenated version.
If you don't register both and your website becomes popular chances are someone, intentionally or otherwise, will pick up the other version.
[edited by: Webwork at 3:57 pm (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
Hyphenated names don't get as much type-in traffic, but they often stand out better in advertisements. Search engines understand hyphens and don't penalize them. Just be sure to do a permanent (301) redirect from one name to the other and you should be OK.
There's little doubt that SEs parse domain-word.com better than domainword.com; but many claim the difference is not as great as it was and a few claim there's no difference at all.
Any benefit of '-' however, is tiny, when you look at the many other factors that really matter. Every Bit Helps is a good argument; but domainword.com is cooler; dread fact, but that's life.
Get both and 301.
Ex. word2word1.com VS word1-word2.com
Thank you all again for your help!
best regards
