Hyphenated or non-hyphenated domains?

[Matrix]

Hello,

Are hyphenated domains good or bad and what are the pros and cons of having a hyphen in a domain name?

[Peter]

I think non-hyphenated domains are always better. Hyphen(s) in a domain are bad from the branding point of view and for word of mouth publicity. It is also rumoured that hyphenated domains have some SEO advantage over the non-hyphenated ones but I don't think a hyphen makes a whole lot of difference in the rankings. The search engines nowadays can separate the keywords in the non hyphenated domain in the same way as they do in a hyphenated domain.

[Pumazooma]

I'd go non-hyphenated (in fact I have )

I think when people talk about sites they tend to miss out things like hyphens or they have to remember them 'its thebigDASHsite.com'.

Also if people are trying to guess where the site is they tend to do so without a hyphen first as those site names are much more common so they're more likely to find it on the first try.

[BillyBobBongo]

I'd never use a hyphen in a domain name! People always type domain names as one word....it's the fastest way to lose business/visits using a hyphen!

[James]

Hyphenated domains provide very minimal or no advantage over the non-hyphenated domains. Search engine can read and parse keywords in the non-hyphenated domain in the same way as they would incase of a domains with hyphens.
Suppose there is a site name abcxyz.com and you are interested in abc-xyz.com then in this case you will loose a lot of type in traffic to the non-hyphented version of the same name.

[paul]

If you check the personal blog of matt cutts, you will find he is even using hyphen and also he has pointed out in his one of the post that there is no any harm of using a hyphen but just if you have two or more hyphen its seems unnatural though. But I personally will prefer non-hyphenated domain name any way as most of you.

[Alexis]

I would suggest you to try and avoid hyphen in a domain as you might loose a lot of type-in traffc to the non hyphenated name and hyphen also reduces the value of the domain.

[AndrewC]

Hyphen in a domain is useful to parse the two keywords in the domain but I am not too sure whether that provides an advantage to the site in the SE rankings. I think the SEs read the both the hyphenated as well the non hyphenated domains in the same way.