There are some rumors that domain names with "minus" as domain-name.com are not so good as domains without "minus" as domainname.com. Could smb explain this to me, please? Coz I think that domain-name.com would be indexed on both of the keywords and that would be better.
Since you posted this in the Google forum, let's look at it from Google's perspective then: Search for "webmaster forum" and look at the results, paying close attention to what Goolge picks up on and the highlights in the results, specifically the url and file structure. With word stemming, it won't make one iota difference IMO to Google whether or not you have the dash or not. You'll see url/file structures in the top ten with and without dashes. Furhter, what would be easier for a visitor if you had the tell them the url: "go to webmasterforum dot com" or "go to webmaster dash forum dot com" I have some domains that contain dashes, but not for Google's sake so to speak. Just my .02
Thanks, wrmineo! your proof is quite evident If not Google where then? I would post it in right forum if I knew it.
I might be totally wrong on this but I seem to recall not too long ago, non-hyphenated words weren't picked up so well in URLs. For example, one of my pages was root/productcopperfencepostcaps.html. When I googled fence post caps, my URL was not highlighted. So I changed it and added hyphens so it was product-copper-fence-post-caps and it was then the relevant words were highlighted on searches Recently (can't say how recent, sorry but I only noticed it a few months ago) the non-hyphenated URLs started being picked up and highlighted too, which I was happy about because I hadn't gotten round to changing all my page names.
I prefer domain names with one or two hyphens, here's why. When you get an unsolicited back link it is often in a form similar to this <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com">www.yourdomain.com</a> If the domain is hyphenated the equivalent would be <a href="http://www.your-domain.com">www.your-domain.com</a>which will automatically give you the keywords ('your' and 'domain' in this case) in the anchor text. Obviously if you have an uninteresting site you are not going to get unsolicited backlinks so it will not make any difference. Google engineer Matt Cutts shines some additional light on the subject in his blog Dashes vs. underscores. I don't agree that a non-hyphenated url is always easier to speak either. If you say "bluewidgets.com" down the phone to a member of the public you inevitably have to say something like "blue widgets all one word dot com" which is not much different to "blue dash widgets dot com". - Michael
I think there may be some confusion about the highlighting of text strings in the SERPs and keyword recognition in the url. If you search Google for webmaster world the SERPs are highlighted wherever the text strings webmaster and world occur including the conjoined webmasterworld. However if you search allinurl:webmaster world there are no pages shown in the SERPs with the conjoined webmasterworld in the url. This would indicate that Google does not index compound words by their component words. It makes sense because there is nothing to be gained in search by knowing that for example butterfly is a compound word consisting of two totally unrelated words butter and fly. The highlighting of text strings in the SERPs has nothing to do with how Google parses compound words for indexing purposes. Hope that helps. - Michael