Are - Domains as valuable as full domains?

I wasn't sure how to word it in a title, but for having an exact match domain is for example

Charlie-Sheen
as good to google for an exact match domain as
CharlieSheen

or

FreeRingTones
Free-Ring-Tones

These are only examples and take no consideration to the content of the site just the url, are the all as valuable as each other?

NO. The domain name with no hyphen may be less human readable (especially for 2 or 3+ words) but it's definitely better for SEO.

i.e. : in term of SEO : FreeRingTones > Free-Ring-Tones

Yup, I agree on 100%. Also it's a bit annoying to type text and from time to time push the far button of "-"
For the moment "-" is an unnecessary symbol

I have tried it with two exact websites.
One is keyword1keyword2.com and the other was keyword1-keyword2.com
Both of them seemed to react well but without "-" is better I must admit.
I do not know if it is correct but I have read somewhere as using "-" for one time is not harmful to SEO but using more than once is bad.
I would follow without a "-" but if it would be a good domain I may select the one with only one "-"

This is interesting, I always thought that hyphens didn't make any difference at all in terms of SEO. My main money-making domain has two hyphens in it. I wonder if that gives it a little disadvantage.

scott8610 said:

This is interesting, I always thought that hyphens didn't make any difference at all in terms of SEO. My main money-making domain has two hyphens in it. I wonder if that gives it a little disadvantage.

Click to expand...

Very little actually. As I said, the same domain without hyphen would be better in terms of SEO if you want to compare them, but just a little bit better.

The difference seems to be really subtle, and unless you register both at the same time and work on both the same way, to see that the one without hyphen will rank just above the other one (just as ulijonroth did), you probably won't really "feel" any actual disadvantage of having an "hyphenated" domain.
Anyway there are so many other parameters in SEO, and this one is really insignificant.

Bottom line is : if you have the choice, go for a domain without hyphen, but if it is taken already, don't worry and take the one with hyphens, it's really no big deal.

I see some serps where the "exact match" effect is displayed for hyphenated domains, so I assume they're not all bad.

Back in the day (long before the EMD madness of today), hyphenated domains were all the rage because G couldn't parse out the different words in the domain if it didn't have hyphens. People would buy these ridiculously long, multiple hyphen domains, and rank for them too. It got so bad that around that time, I vaguely remember Matt Cunts saying that domains with more than one hyphen could be considered spammy. This was in the same era that he was recommending you use hyphens rather than underscores in filenames.

I avoid hyphens because they just look cheap and shitty IMO. If you're building a decent site, you want a brandable domain, and if you're building a spam site, you want to do everything you can to minimize the appearance of spamminess.

Just a coincidence, I bought a hypened domain today which is exact match and a 55k search rate a month.
The site is brandly new, and as I decided to test RSS aggregators instead of Auto Blogs. As I have asked for info from BHW at the thread below.
Let's see what happens next...

I think everyone agrees that it is less valuable.

What I would like to know if its better to use the hyphens, or add a modifier to the domain like "my" or "blog", or use a lower quality ending like ".net", ".org", or ".info"?

Unfortunately I have enough problems ranking my sites to work on a test project

Try to stay away from hyphens as much as you can. A no-hyphened domain is always better than a hyphened one. But if you must dont use more then 1 hyphen..... 2 hyphens is "pushing it".

In the theory a .com domain without hypens is the best. But in practically if you do the right SEO studies on a net or even an info domain you can get good rankings for them.

I have a .net domain which I started about 2 months ago getting many ranks in many keywords and giving me about $10 a day by the shoppers.

Also I have an info domain (which is an autoblog) which is on top 3 in more than 9 million sites with a very hard competition keyword.

These are some examples but .com seems the best option.

I agree too. No hypen is good for seo