Question about SEs and hyphens

[Ronald Regging]

I know Search engines ignore hyphens between words, such as "online-poker" would be the same as "online poker". My question is does it work this way for single words also? Like would "p-lanet" be the same as "planet" ?

I'm not worried about quality of the domain, just SE placement...

Thanks

 

[amosba]

I would expect the SEs to treat hyphens as spaces, so "p-lanet" would appear to the SE as "p lanet".

 

[Ronald Regging]

yeah thats what im hearing elsewhere, which is what i suspected, so I guess it wouldnt help at all in SE placement. Thanks for the response.

 

[ZannuZZi]

I think that it'll help you because people often be mistaken in search.

 

[loran76]

As far as I know it's not very good having a hyphen in the keywords or a domain. And surely SEs don't see it at all.

 

[dynamiteweb]

If you want to be technical, having the hyphen is better than having a one word domain, if you are talking strictly about SEs. Hypehns are viewed as spaces. If you want to rank for "blue widgets", blue-widgets.com is more relevant than bluewidgets.com. But, having the keyword in the URL in the long term doesn't amount to much. It's all about content. My suggestions would be to find a brandable domain and use it. Build your content around that. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Ronald Regging]

I guess I can elaborate on this since I've decided against registering it. The domain in my sig is for emoscene.com. The term "emo scene" has an OVT of around 1200, and I'm already ranked fairly well for that term, but the resulting traffic isn't anything special (every little bit counts though). The general keyword I am aiming for is "emo" which has an OVT of almost 250,000. So I noticed that em-o.com was available to reg and I was just wondering if it would help me gain high search engine ranking for that term if I created a basic site with a bunch of quality content and then used a huge banner ad in an attempt to direct the resulting traffic to my main site.

But from what I've read, the SEs would treat it as "em o" and therefore it would be useless. Besides this, my site has started ranking for the term "emo" in the past 2 days, so I guess with time I will reach the desired results.

Thanks everyone for the replies.