hypens - in a domain name

[L146705]

Whats your opinon on having a hypen (-) in a domain name?

[GuyFromChicago]

In terms of SEO...

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

[Mister Tut]

I use hyphens in most of my domains. I still manage to get high SERPS for the terms I go after.

[Skinny]

The thing is that people will often forget their is a hyphen.

eg. good-boys.com. Someone will remember "good boys", but forget the hyphen.

Also you have to consider how it sounds when you say it to someone.

"my site is good hyphen boys.com"

Besides that it doesn't really make a difference.

Skinny

[Mister Tut]

Well, remember the good old example of www . experts-exchange . com ? Without the hyphen it's expertsexchange.com.

I reg'ed discoflight.com for my company, but it is supposed to be disc of light, not disco flight, so I had to go back and grab disc-of-light.com in addition to the first domain. D'oh!

[L146705]

Hypens seem to be good for search engines but not good for word of mouth referrals. I think over the long term that leaving them out is the best option if you want your site to grow. But it seems like a lot of the .com domain names have been taken by hosting companies.

[weblord]

go with hyphens if it's fully spelled out pronounceable 2 word domain, but if it means nothing just shorten it like sell domains became sedo something like that IMHO

[Jenni]

Hyphens can be good sometimes- even more so in the case of expertsexchange.com and experts-exchange.com like Mister Tut said.

[netprophet]

Whats your opinon on having a hypen (-) in a domain name?

Hyphen is good in serps point of view but in case of new returning visitors, they don't like type hyphen they sometime type wrong domain due to presence of hypen.:)

[RNelson]

I use - i have www.Connect-Hosting.com and no1 complains and i make quite abit ;)

[eukhost]

I think one should try and avoid hyphen as a hyphen reduces the domain's value. Hyphen is not good from branding point of view and for word-of-mouth publicity. Also hyphenated names lose type-in traffic to the name without hyphen.

[Carl05]

yeah a funny one i saw was penisland.com hehehe would have looked a lot better with a hyphen .. pen-island.com
then again though i recon it got a lot of hits to boost it up a bit

[tntcheats]

I'd use hyphens for directories (including mod_rewrite), and file names; but not for the domain itself.

Most SE's are good at picking out keywords, anyways.

[faisj]

it decreases the value of the domain imho

[SteveG]

Hyphens will not hurt you from a SEO perspective, but may be detrimental for visitors who type in your domain.

[allroundguy]

Get it on scientificdomainappraisals.com. A number of people, mostly people who try to sell appraisal services, try to convince the world to believe in appraising models and parameters. There is no domain value estimation legislation or standard, so we are all free to put forth any theory about value. But the fact is that things have just the value that each of us puts on it. Hyphens can add or bring down value in the eyes of some people, but that does not mean we all must believe that.