Do hyphens such as whitetaildeer-hunting.com have any impact on search results, rankings, etc? Either positive, negative, or indifferent?
Usually people use to separate the keyword of the domain and try to give some weight but this is not recommended. Because might think you use it to spam keywords, domain name with hyphen is hard to remember. Forget about the hyphen and go for shorten domain name.
Definitely good points. I recently purchased three domains with hyphens to conduct additional experiments which is something I have fun doing. We'll see how they fare in the coming months.
Agreed, hyphened domains do not affect search engine rankings. In fact, you can do some searches and you will find that some hyphened domains rank better than the single long domain. However, the problem with hyphened domains are that they do not have any status as 'Premium' domains. They loose a lot of value in terms of income when you decide to sell them. Also, hyphened domains are difficult to promote, users don't always remember them and you will loose some traffic to the single domain.
Agreed with others here, it doesn't matter. If you expect people to come back naturally though, you might want to avoid them.
I think if there is more than 1 hypen, it may affect search ranking. Because usually spammers use more hypens.
At all cost. Hypens and a must to stay away from. My personal reason: they look terrible, hard to create logo for and hard to create a brand with.
it is negative effect. it is similar to effect of .info or any other generic crap tld that is registered because the .com/.net/.org are already taken. Do you thing google is should like and rank high new face-book.com or micro-soft.com? Me neither.
Hyphens within domain urfs matter to Search engine results, doesn't affected directly.Hyphen affect indexing, page ranking.
A hyphen in domains destroys the whole concept of SEO. It's near difficult to find your site without typing a hyphen in the search engine