Dashed Domains??

There's always a lot of debate in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) over what works, what doesn't, and what will get you banned by the search engines.

One of the hot topics these days is the dash, also called a hyphen.

Yup, that little dash on your keyboard has caused a lot of arguments lately. Why?

Some people think that using dashes in your domain could appear spammy to the search engines and it will get your site banned, all traffic will stop and your site will implode into a giant black hole.

Some spammy sites have been known to stuff their domain with keywords and use dashes to keep it somewhat readable. These sites offer little valuable content and use keyword stuffing and other black-hat (unethical) tactics to get a high ranking.

But there are simply too many websites out there that use dashes for perfectly legitimate reasons. And keyword stuffing can be done without dashes anyway.

Thousands of established sites being dropped just because a few spammers used a couple dashes in their domain? I just don't but it. If you want to use dashes, go right ahead.

Personally, I try not to use them only because I find it easier to communicate the site name without them. For example, one of my sites is top5affiliateprograms.com. It's a lot clearer when speaking to say than top-5-affiliate-programs.com.

Plus, some people will forget to add the dashes when typing the address and you may lose some customers.

But that said, I've used dashes on sites before and had no problem with being dropped by the search engines. So its really whatever you like best.

Don't waste your energy arguing about it. Use the time to work on your site instead. :)