Possible algo modification on hypenated domains?

[bwagner]

Hello,

The ranking for my website has dropped during the last update, from 5th to 20th, without my modifying it. This drop would seem to be due to an algo modification. (My PR is stable at 6).

I suspect that my domain name could be causing grief.
It is www.word-keyword1-keyword2.com
This 3-word URL is my company name and is perfectly relevant to my activity.

I chose my 3-word company name / URL for :
a)Relevance to my activity
and
b)SEO purposes (contains 2 primary keywords and starts with letter A)

Can it be that I'm being penalized for having 2 hyphens in my domain?
I've heard rumours that over 1 hyphen can be considered spam.
I find this hard to swallow as there are many on-topic, descriptive 3-word URLs that bring valuable info to the SE user.

Please reassure me that the URL is not a problem, as it will be lots of work to ask all the 150 sites linking to me to change over. Plus changing URL without any downtime or loss of rank if very tricky...

Thanks for your valuable advice,

Bruno

[jaytierney]

Based on what I've seen, I suspect you may be right. Hyphenated domains do seem to have taken quite a hit this time around... which is unfair, because I run a few of them and they are actually quality web sites with good content.

[GoogleGuy]

bwagner, we don't penalize for hyphens at all.

[Grumpus]

GoogleGuy beat me to it, but I was going to say that I'm seeing generally improved rankings and my domain is hypenated.

G.

[bwagner]

Thank you very much for your speedy reply (esp. Googleguy).

A great help and has saved me all the effort and expense of an URL change.

Bruno