The Effect of Using a Hyphen on a Google Ranking
Since 2011, Google has applied the "Panda" algorithm to its search engine in an effort to improve search results -- especially by eliminating spammy, weak content and upholding solid content belonging to reputable businesses and organizations. Overall, there have been polarized views about whether Google Panda labels as spam hyphenated domain names -- such as those in "domain-name.com" style instead of "domainname.com" -- thus ranking them lower in Google search results.
Back in the early 1990's when "surfing the Web" was still a new concept to many people, the hyphen in website domains was favored by Web users. People browsing the Web liked it whenever they encountered hyphens because they made multiple-word Web addresses more clear, with a hyphen separating each word, according to Domainate, a domain consulting service. After all, before website domains there wasn't really any reason to not put a space or a hyphen between words. To do so was considered either bad grammar or a misspelling.
But then people became accustomed to hyphen-less domains. So, generally, whenever someone heard the name of a website, he'd assume that it contained no hyphen. Later, if that same person tried to visit that website, he'd type the website URL without a hyphen, assuming, once again, that it's hyphen-less. This became a disadvantage to businesses that used hyphens in their website addresses, since some people would unknowingly visit another business' website instead.
So, fearing lost Web traffic, businesses began to shy away from using hyphens in their domain names. But at the same time, marketers realized that hyphens could actually help a website rank higher in search results, including Google search results, with a little help from search engine optimization. Noticing this trend, SEO marketers gobbled up hyphenated domain names for their SEO value, but didn't put as much effort into content quality as they did into optimizing websites for search engines, especially the Google search engine.
So hyphenated Web domains then got the reputation for being low-quality and spammy. As Google cracked down on low-quality sites with its Panda algorithm, naturally that affected many low-quality websites with hyphenated addresses. Because of that, many have concluded that putting a hyphen in a Web address will automatically cheapen it. But others disagree, saying that Google doesn't target hyphens but websites that lack value. They reason that if Google targeted all hyphenated websites, that would end up unfairly hurting quality websites containing hyphens in their addresses. The recommendation, then, is to focus primarily on making websites with quality content, and to worry less about hyphens -- especially if your business' website already has a hyphen.
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