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The pages were all spidered before I recognized the error.
Now my question is... was it an error at all, where Google is concerned?
Of course I want to change the pages for user experience, but do I have anything to worry about for now?
Bit of a discussion over here in this thread about page titles
[webmasterworld.com...]
That thread's a great read. :)
When I come up (#1, baby!) in SERPS for "wholesale widget" and I view Google's cache of my page, G of course highlights all instances of 'wholesale' and 'widget' in my page text. Important to note, though, is that these two words are also separately highlighted within my domain name.
In other words, Google is smart enough to discern and harvest the individual words in your nonhyphenated domain names.
Back to your exact question- why you'd want or need to hyphenate page titles (except maybe 1 or 2 hyphens as true punctuation) completely escapes my understanding. If for spiderability, simple spaces are better or equal. For readability, hyphens are worse.And apparently there was some talk around the Search Engine Strategies conference that SE's might devalue highly hyphenated domains some day, because so many are so blatantly used for spammy keyword-stuffing.
When I come up (#1, baby!) in SERPS for "wholesale widget" and I view Google's cache of my page, G of course highlights all instances of 'wholesale' and 'widget' in my page text. Important to note, though, is that these two words are also separately highlighted within my domain name.
In other words, Google is smart enough to discern and harvest the individual words in your nonhyphenated domain names.
Back to your exact question- why you'd want or need to hyphenate page titles (except maybe 1 or 2 hyphens as true punctuation) completely escapes my understanding. If for spiderability, simple spaces are better or equal. For readability, hyphens are worse.And apparently there was some talk around the Search Engine Strategies conference that SE's might devalue highly hyphenated domains some day, because so many are so blatantly used for spammy keyword-stuffing.