Domain names with or without hyphens?

Hi all,

I'm looking for information about hyphens in a domain name.
Do they work better than domain names without hyphens?
can the Search Engines select key words from a domain name with out hyphens?

Any help will be much appreciated!
Thanks!

Well yes and no. I hate the look of the all the url's out there with hyphens, but I do know from experience that I have gotten great positioning from the keywords I have within the hyphens of the URL.

In my opinion it really doesn't matter since the main things that are important in most cases are how people link to you, how many people link to you, and how much content/quality you have. However, I do not think I have ever bought a domain name with a hyphen in it, because I dislike the look. I would say go for what you think looks best to you.

I'm the same as vetofunk on this...

Personally I hate domains with hyphens, purely from a word-of-mouth advertising aspect..

your-website.com is going to get many people going to yourwebsite.com when the domain is spread through word of mouth (which is still the best form of advertising - personal recommendations)...

But, as veto-funk says, if you're searching for "your website", then maybe your-website.com would rank higher than yourwebsite.com assuming all other aspects of the domains' content are equal.

With both of these things in mind, and the relative cheap cost of domains these days, it might be worth getting both with and without the hyphen.

That's right, if you can, get both. Looking at a bunch of search results, I don't really see a dominance in hyphen-urls and nonhyphenurls. If you really want to find out, I guess you could buy both domains and see which one comes out on top given equal links to them

Let us know of any results if you do!