Anyone seen a Google authority site with - hyphen? Etc; gold-fish.com, online-casinos.com, I'm planning to register a new domain and make it into an authority site. So i was wondering if anyone seen any of authority sites which are hyphenated. I want to see for myself if it would affect G SEPRs....
It shouldnt affect it at all. The only plus to a non-hyphen domain is that users misspell is less often, I know I forget the hyphen a lot of times on a few sites I visit. But aside from that it should not affect your google ranks as I see it.
Check --- www.internet-web-directory.com http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=internet-web-directory&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq= Check -- www.best-web-directories.com http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=best+web+directories&btnG=Search
'Authority site' isn't a fixed definition. You won't find 2 people who agree on exactly what an authority site is or isn't. If you just mean something that turns up at the top of serps - there are loads of them with hyphens.
Agree with 'Magda' and most of the example above showing SiteLinks for the mentioned websites in the SERP's which might not be necessary related to the domain entire authority value within the search engines.. However, Hyphen was not an issue in the past just try not to over do it.. any thing more than 3 dashes in the domain might be considered spamming
I have a site with hyphen. For 9 months it ranks n1 in yahoo and n4 in google for a word with 10 000 searches monthly.
I do think it doesn't matter if you use a hyphen in a domain or not. People think search engine will easily separate keywords in a hyphenated domain but that is simply a myth. I do some experiments on it and the top ranking site don't always have hyphen on it and infact. you may try searching high competitive keywords like "make money online". In the google SERP, it always highlights the keyphrase "makemoneyonline" on a domain or URL. It means Google recognize they are three separate words instead of one word. Therefore, hyphen or not, doesn't really matter.
Of course hyphnes dont matter.. They are very good anyways. If u have 33 keyword domain better to have it with hyphen.
Hyphenated sites are generally less valuable than unhypenated. The reason being is people don't generally type in a hyphen when typing an url, although it does make it easier to sort out the words in the address.