I always recommend to clients that if they are building a legitimate web site that they intend to keep indefinitely and brand, one that they want to represent their business… one that they will want people to remember from offline and online marketing… that they get a non-hyphenated domain name. It’s more about usability than anything.

A legitimate business’ domain name should be as short as possible, easy to remember, easy to speak, easy to type. Adding hyphens makes the domain name longer, harder to remember, harder to speak, harder to type.

Also, visitors and other webmasters seem to view non-hyphenated domains as more legitimate since spammers and affiliate marketers are notorious for buying/promoting hyphenated domains. Even if they do rank well, hyphenated domains will get fewer click-thrus than its non-hyphenated equivalent because they are perceived as less legitimate. AND they will attract fewer natural backlinks from other webmasters because webmasters also see theme as less legitimate.

When is using a hyphenated domain name acceptable? I think it’s a good option if you ONLY care about being found through search engines and PPC as in the case of an affiliate marketer trying to rank well for some single high volume, highly competitive search term and the non-hyphenated domain is already taken. Having an exact match domain like “my-keyword-phrase.com” will make it much easier to rank for “my keyword phrase” since exact match domains do get a big boost at Google and most engines. But ranking well for a single high volume, highly competitive phrase for an affiliate marketer can be a gold mine… and the reduced click-thrus and reduced natural linking to their domain doesn’t is not that important.

Just my $0.02…

So hyphenated domains rank well for you?

I’ve used two different hyphenated domains for a while and I don’t believe that the hyphen is an onerous obstacle.

I rank very high for Google images on certain keywords/search terms. Sometimes I wonder if people who use Google images instead of plain Google (web) want to just look at a product instead of buying it?
People still find my sites — even pages that have not been updated for some time.

I do not think that I’ve “killed sales” due to the use of a hyphen. I’ve found that some search engines will look at the first time alone and the second term alone and then also the combination.

The structures/layouts of my sites need improvement. Improved layouts + fresh content will override the “handicap” of the hyphen.

So hyphenated domains rank well for you? How do they do in comparison with non-hyphenated ones? I’d love to hear about your (or anyone else’s, for that matter) experience.