Domain Question, Hyphenated or Not?
 

Are hyphenated domains penalized by the SE's? And is there any downside to hyphenated domains?

Also the .mobi... Is that getting used? Pro's, or Cons of .mobi? Yes, it is for mobile traffic.

My hyphenated names do good in Yahoo, but not Google

i would forget .mobi.....do you type in .mobi much ??? if the answer is no well thats the same for most people.

most use a redirect script from thier .com for mobiles or choose xxxxmobile.com etc it seems.

maybe .mobi will take off one day but its not at the moment.

hyphen .com's work in search, but I would go with a non hyphen domain, much easier to brand and remember.

.mobi = worthless :2 cents:

Cool, thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated!

Hyphenated domains and .mobi instead of .com will appear lower in the search results in Google.

We didn't get that memo with claudia-marie.com
The hyphen won't matter one iota search engine wise as long as you deliver the goods and google "sees" it on your site. Quality and good descriptive text is the king.

Anyway, we have tons of google and other search engine traffic on claudia-marie.com
So I don't think the hyphen bothers Google at all

Here are my analytics for claudia-marie.com for march:

# Referring Sites 1,395,296.00 (84.48%)
#
Direct Traffic 156,990.00 (9.51%)
#
Search Engines 99,341.00 (6.01%)
#
Other 4 (> 0.00%)

The hyphen debate will all depend on who you ask, and what they do. But more importantly it will depend on what your search criteria is. In alot of cases it won't matter since you're probably looking for a 2 or 3 word key search, or a cluster.
If you're going to go with a hyphen you have to make sure your supporting text is dead on, and you have a fair amount of experience in ranking. Since a mistake could result in a mis-rank. None hyphen domains are alot more forgiving in my opinion, and experience.
For .mobi I'd say register it and just hang on to it. Right now it's a waste but domain names are not an infinite product, eventually .com,.net,.org names will run out and alternate extension will become more popular and more SE acceptable. But of course that all depends on your predictions on the future of the Internet. ;)

cool, yes the hyphens on a domain address is counted spider wise as a space?!? am i mistaken about this?

So the domain would read claudia "space" marie.com for indexing purposes? ...using your example robbie. Just trying to know if this is true. I have searched the term and it is my understsnding that a hyphen would count as a space.

thanks billyhoe

doesn't matter. don't bother with .mobi. just don't use something like free-porn-online-today.com

since everyone is an seo expert the only thing you can trust is the serps themselves. study what ranks, what doesn't etc. that is the final truth.

thank you, I appreciate the info!