domain name advice: Google and hyphens

should I buy a hyphen if the non-hyphen is gone?

[caines]

Hi everyone,

Sorry if this is the wrong place for this, please move or delete if it is. I was wondering if anyone had any advice on whether it is a good idea and what pitfalls might arise in the following scenario

I would like to set up a site about green widgets but www.greenwidgets.com is gone the site is not active as such it is parked with a directory, advertising style page up. The site www.green-widgets.com is available and would be a perfect option but I'm just wondering if the other site is likely to get some traffic from me with people forgetting the hyphen and if they ever did set up a competing site about greenwidgets they might have quite an advantage over me. Am I being too cautious? Could there be any issues in terms of Google, will it consider the site names too similar? I know I've seen active bluewidget.com and blue-widget.com sites before and I don't think it makes a difference to the search engines but thought I should check. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

[tedster]

This has been discussed many times and there is a strong consensus. Google representatives have made it clear that there is no different handling for a single hyphen domain than for a no-hyphen domain. Many site owners here also report excellent rankings with their hyphenated domains.

Google recently has admitted a bug with their site: operator and hyphenated domains, but they are fixing it and they claimed that it didn't affect the regular SERPs (although some reports here see it differently.) At any rate, these issues "should be" short term -- it was not intentional.

The biggest drawback with a hyphen in a domain is not with Google, it's with users who want to type in the domain. They often get it wrong -- so yes, if the non-hyphenated is up and working, then they would get some of your type-in traffic.