ElementsDaily

When it comes purchasing domain names, I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues purchase hyphenated domains because the non-hyphenated versions were already taken by someone else. I don’t really think that’s a wise practice because most type-ins (surfers who type in a domain name rather than landing on a website via a search engine) will type in the name without the hyphens. In that case I just recommend spending a little bit of time and getting a bit creative to come up with a unique domain name.

But if you dismiss the type-in traffic, can a hyphenated name really hurt you? Not so according to Bing’s program manager, Brett Yount and Google software engineer Matt Cutts whose blog has become the voice of Google’s best practices for SEO. Both have publicly stated that hyphens in a URL act as keyword separators.