I have a whole bunch of them, I have not noticed any diff. I have 1 that is on page 1 google for a very competitive term. Those are my first go-to for certain great URL keywords, but normal is taken. A year or so ago they were easy to get cause not a lot of people knew about them. Now they are more common. The search engines ignore the - so you can register stuff like www.twit-ter.com if you want but usually those get req for trademark infringement. I thought about doing that on a bunch, and just iframe redirect to the actual site, but you could put in a win lotto or zip/email submit popup first.
I've been banging out tiny niche sites and the ONLY ones that haven't ranked are the ones that I used dashes in the domain. I think there's two aspects to this. If you want to rank IMMEDIATELY in a tiny niche, then avoid dashes. If you want to build an authority site, then it's irrelevant. With enough back links you can rank any domain for any keyword. I've got a little formula going where I use the same template, go after (roughly) the same amount of searches and the same amount of competition. When they get indexed, I can place my sites in the top 3 pages, then with a couple of ezine article links I end up on page one. (Like I said, they're small niches) The ONLY things that don't work for me are dashes and .infos. This whole process usually takes 3-5 weeks. If someone loves dashes, please state how fast you ranked and how many back links did you push?
Well, you have a point that I use. If a non dash version of a url is avail I will always choose non dash. The issue for me most of the time is getting the high value keywords in my url rather than caring about dash or not The pattern I use is first create 2 spinner articles and submit to blog networks to get dist over time. Then I take 1 verson and do ezine, 1 for squidoo, 1 for hubpages. Then I start social bookmark. The stuff other than blog I do in about 1 week then stop. The only seo after this is blog articles. I have many keywords and pages on dash sites with relative high rankings (top 30) on the same site doing this method. A few sites are top 10 Posted via Mobile Device
Spot on. My oldest (and most profitable) domain has dashes, but I wouldn't use dashes in a new domain that I'd like to do well quickly.
