Hyphens - How do they effect a domain?

[Tomi-gwc]

More specifically how would it effect these conditions?

I'm going to beat about the bush because I haven't registered it yet so bare with me.

There is a popular game which has been released this year, it has been announced that there will be x amount of followups. gamename-x.com is available. x being a number which is one of the followups.

Copyright aside - Is there any problems with hyphenated domains such as above? SEO problems perhaps? I plan to develop the site with information about the upcoming game - obviously search engine wise there will be a lot of competition with review sites and the like.

Basically, I have been inspired by how well a friend did with this site:
http://www.callofduty-5.com

And his site doesn't contain a huge amount of info about the game.


Really simply I just want people to tell me what they think about hyphens, the pros the cons etc...

Thanks

 

[MicroGuy]

Really simply I just want people to tell me what they think about hyphens....

You will probably get a split response on your replies. People either love them or hate them. I think they stink really, really bad.

 

[mhdoc]

I think you can make some claim they help the search engines parse the keywords in your domain. Of course they do pretty well without them too

If I expected people to type in the domain name I would avoid them. However, all my traffic comes from search engines so I don't think hyphens or tld matter for me.

 

[painperdu]

The problem with hyphenated names is that they throw a learning curve at potential users. People have to not only memorize 'name5.com' but they need to remember the hyphen and whenever there's more learning involved there's bound to be more chances for mistakes to occur.

There are more chances for not remembering or not spelling correctly. The hyphen makes it that much harder to communicate the name to others. If you need to tell someone about the site you have to say 'name hyphen 5 dot com'.

The only time a hyphenated name may not cause that much of a problem is when it is printed. How often does that occur however?

It just takes extra effort to promote hypenated names.

 

[WORDSWORTH]

I personally don't mind hyphens but they can hurt the reseller value of a domain bigtime. I tend to stay away from them for that reason. That hyphen makes the name more cumbersome to pronounce and also adds an extra character to the length. Of course, if you can get great keywords with a hyphen for a competitive price, something like credit-card.com, then you can still have a very valuable domain. Other than that, proceed with caution IMO, especially in current market conditions.

Of course, if you plan to develop and pump money into a site, then it often pays to have both versions in .com if you can get them. However, I personally would not invest in a hyphen domain where the non hyphenated version was already taken as you risk leaking traffic (and business) to that other domain.

 

[recluse99]

It is hard to determine the value with or without the hyphen, I regged a name with two keywords seperated by hyphen and after a two months, with no promotion, I had 400+ uniques... so with some promotion + marketing it could have been alot better , but I sold it It really didn't fit with my plans anyway...

 

[shig]

I would say their second best, behind the same keywords without a hyphen.

 

[bmugford]

Hyphenated domains are far more popular with end users than domainers without a doubt.

They work well when there are two keywords separated by 1 well placed hyphen.

Brad

 

[cobainer]

I wouldn't suggest using a hyphenated domain name...I've been through the trauma personally.. :D