Hyphenated Domains and on effect SERP's - quote from Google

[shags38]

The following is a response from John Mueller of Google to a question raised at SMX Israel 2013 (Search Marketing Expo)

5 Minutes With John Mueller

Q: I have an exact match domain and I have lost a huge chunk of my traffic and cannot seem to recover. My site has dashes in it, does the number of dashes in the URL affect rankings?
A: The exact match update was primarily targeting low quality domains. If the site is good, with good content then it shouldn’t suffer from this update. The number of dashes in a URL does not affect rankings.

I post this in the hope it may be beneficial to those that had any doubts about the use of 'Hyphenated' domains and their effect in SERP's.

Matt Cutts in a video recently (will have to take my word for it - haven't tried to find it again) covered this and said up to three (3) dashes wasn't a problem but beyond that number "may" cause the googlebot to query the url.

Coupling the hyphenated domains and the EMD factor it suggests with the source of TLD domains becoming thinner daily that EMD Hyphenated domains could become more valuable, for monetizing not branding of course.

cheers,
Shags

link to the report source http://3doordigital.com/121-tips-from-smx-israel-2013/ and more here http://www.seroundtable.com/smx-israel-2013-recap-16186.html