I would add a semi-related side conversation to this news if you are in the process of buying a domain name...

What about hyphenated domains names? I see quite a lot of real estate sites that have domains similar to portland-oregon-best-home-buys-for-real-estate-today.com (not real, but the format is similar to many real sites). Long and hyphenated domains names do not quite come to mind as easily as short multi word names like bestbuy.com, citysearch.com, cameraworld.com, pyramidbrewing.com, slickdeals.net, etc. While .com is probably the most known and understood domain name extension, and it's not a bad idea to snap up a good .com, .net, or .org domain, the addition of several underscores or hyphens between keywords is probably not a good idea for all sites.

It's true that when some one decides to link to your site or a page from your site, they could choose to link like this (fake address for the example but based on this): Matts Cutts has an open call for Google Web Master console feature improvements.

But many web site owners, bloggers, etc. may choose to link to a web site or page using the actual url like this:
Matt Cutts talks about the Google Webmaster console on this page http://www.google-web-master-console.com/blog/webmaster-console-features/

So, in either case, a search engine -may- decide that google, web, master, or console can be used to slightly boost the rankings. If anything this would be a cumulative boost, along with many other factors. Quite a number of affiliate marketers swear by the hyphenation technique because it could help you to not only rank for your domain name but also for keywords that you are probably targeting.

Can you be sure that your site's visitors will remember to put hyphens in the right places? What if they combine two words that should be separate? Typing in -real-estate- vs. -realestate- could lead them to a competitor. Even if you decide that you will pick up many of the off spellings and variations of your main domain, it seems like you exponentially grow the number domains you'll need to snap up to protect your main domain from typos and mis-spellings when you go with a hyphenated domain.

What about reputation issues? Domains that have more than 1 or 2 hyphens, look potentially spammy or throw away in nature to visitors and search engines. With out doing anything but looking at the addresses, where do you feel you are more likely to find the real site between these 3: bestbuy.com, best-buy.com, or best-buy-stores-and-sales.com? When discussing this with some of my less internet savvy (but getting smarter all the time) relatives, they point out that they occasionally receive emails that include URLs similar to ebay-customer-service.somerandomcompany.com. They've learned, that the URL is probably related to a phishing web site which is trying to con them out of their credit card number or ebay log in. In turn, they tend to stay away from odd looking (hyphenated) domains not only in emails, but also from search engines and web pages.

Need more advice on choosing a domain? I highly recommend two articles from last year, one from Folksonomy.org called "7 Tips for Naming Your Web 2.0 Startup" and one from Planet Ocean called "How URLs Can Affect Top Search Engine Rankings". From Folksonomy's article, I have to agree that most sites should avoid domain name hacks like Yahoo's "Del.icio.us". From personal experience, when I first started hearing about Del.icio.us, I never seemed to be able to type their domain into a browser on the first try. Trying to look it up in a search engine? Impossible at the time, I would receive annoying search engine responces like "did you mean icon?" when trying to type in parts of the Del.icio.us name with the periods in the wrong places. Annoying as it is, engines try to second guess unique keywords and phrases even if they are within domain names. Months later, Google now associates icio as well as delicious with del.icio.us. As Folksonomy points out, because of issues similar to my own, Yahoo eventually bought just plain delicious.com.

I would add to either of these domain name choosing articles, that you also should take care in inventing words or combining words for your domain name. Perform some searches to see if there are any "did you mean" replies from Google, Yahoo, etc. It actually might be best if a "did you mean" option does -not- show up under a keyword search. Long time SEO and pundit Sugar Rae created a new blog in 2005 yet she recently said that she could not be found on Google for her own, unique site name "sugarrae". This is despite having decent links back to her web site, lots published content on her web site and others pointing back, etc. After venting on her blog last month, gaining a bit more noteriety, and links, her web site is now found for her unique domain name phrase. Understand as well that not every site will have the same quick resolution from the engines when something goes wrong. It may be a good idea to go into domain buying mode with a small bit of foresight into potential issues that could crop up.

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