Do search engines care about hyphens?

Do search engines care about hyphens in domain names? I have a dog grooming site and as an example one of my pages is dog-grooming-equipment.html. Does the SE differentiate between this and doggroomingequipment.html? Are there advantages to either one?

Thanks.

 

No, you will be fine. Hyphens are ok but avoid underscores.

 

make it maximum of 2 or 3.. otherwise the domain itself looks spammy.

 

I guess both Hyphens and underscores are OK. the url of DMOZ directory also include underscores.

 

For pages you can use hyphens. That doesn't matter for search engines. It will be easier to read and looks better.

Domain names which do not use hyphens are better than those which use hyphens.

Eg. doggrooming.com is better than dog-grooming.com

 

thanks everyone! Very helpful replies!

 

Hyphen used as best separator mark.
if u use seoservicesusa, than it won't make sense,
but if you use like seo-services-usa, will make some sense in choosing an internal page names.

 

Matt cutts (Google seo boy) reccomends using hypens. That the only info I have read on the subject that is reliable.

 

hyphens with your major keyword of your niche are more advantage when it comes to SEO.

 

yes ofcourse it does diffrentiate and treat the two as different domain names. Using hypen is a better choice since it is easy to read and your keywords are recognized easily

 

Can you elaborate please?

 

they are recommended to rank for multi word keywords

 

Stay away if possible from hyphenated domain name, if there is no way use only single hyphen.

 

Hyphens have no negative affects at all.

In fact from my own observations im above a site of a similar name that is older the only difference is the hyphen

 

keywords within the domain give only a minimal boost, where they do get some boost, the hyphen helps.

 

its good to put hyphes, it seperate keywords.

 

yes i agree with you!

 

i do agree with you

 

the issue was really about inner pages such as doggrooming.com/dog-grooming-equipment.html.

 

The disadvantages i only see are:
- URL looks ugly (if you use more than 2 hyphens)
- User will forget to type hyphens in your domain name and go to your competitors.