I know hyphens are a problem for domain names but are they a problem for interior pages? For example, my site. sierra-vista-homes-land.com has an internal pages sierra-vista-homes-land.com/html/about_the_mcnabs.php. Would it be better to have this page sierra-vista-homes-land.com/html/aboutthemcnabs.php? BYW, I am in the process of changing my domain name to get rid of the hyphens
Those are underscores my friend and it would be better to have: about-the-mcnabs.php or aboutthemcnabs.php
Who says they are a problem at all? I get about 20,000 visitors a day and over half of that goes to hyphenated domains and at least half the remaining traffic goes to domains without hyphens that has pages with hyphens. Hyphenated filenames and domains are brilliant, Google can easily distinguish individual words and rank pages accordingly. The SEO myth that hyphenated domains are bad has been caused by the number of total shite sites that are created on new domains and since it was common place for those who understand SEO to buy hyphenated domains over non hyphenated there's been a tendacy for: "I used a hyphenated domain for my autoblog/thin affiliate/shite site and Google doesn't give it any traffic, clearly this site that took me an entire 20 minutes to add a billion copied pages too should rank better than Wikipedia, afterall it is mostly Wikepedias content, but better SEO'd, therfore Google pennalises hyphenated domains not my shite site." David Law