Doing a little study at Yahoo about how they are now looking at keywords in the domain, I have see how they spot the keywords in the domain. If a domain is stuctured as mine above, they will see keyword1 but not keyword2. Though, if a hyphen seperates the words they see both, as exactly what their press release states. Do some testing for yourself and you will see them highlight keyword1 but not keyword2. If they actually count the words in ranking a site, that is their secret.
Now this is not an old domain and is just starting to be promoted. I have a few good links out there now and its starting to show up in several engines. It has not been submitted to Yahoo or Looksmart yet, but has been to Dmoz.(site note 100% complete yet, hense the wait).
This site is not in the "very" competitive type of keywords, but I give it a 7 out of 10 range, 10 being terms like travel or mp3.
As far as I can tell, Yahoo is the only place that not having the hyphen may really hurt my rank, the little affect it really does have. Is there anyone that would suggest I start over with a new domain, keyword1-keyword2.com and make me do all the work up to this point over again.
The best cenario I can think of if I did descide to change domains would be to just put up 301 redirect to the new domain so the SEs find the new site quickly. Plus, clicks from established links will find the site with these redirects, but I need to send all the webmasters a note to try and get them to actuall change them for link pop.(more work, 400+ links)
Option I won't consider is a mirrored domain just for Yahoo. Why, no link pop for my old domain. The big keyword is keyword1, the keyword2 is generic and only is relevant if with keyword1. So if 85% of my relevance for keyword matched in the domain is already covered by Yahoo matching keyword1, should I really change.
Does anyone have something to consider I have not thought of??
Perhaps keywords in the domain are over-rated?
I prefer hyphenated domains for seo but some sites just get that "thing" and no matter what it does well.
