Following up from the observation in my last post, I decided to test against a domain where I’d bought the hyphenated .com version just over a month ago and the concatenated .org version a week ago. That is word1-word2.com and word1word2.org.

Now since the hyphenated version went live, it debuted at position 125 on google. It quickly dropped out the rankings and has not returned to date. The concatenated version meanwhile has just debuted at 22. That’s quite a difference in treatment!

Okay, so 2 sets of examples is hardly a test, but seeing as I’ve already heard that this is the case from what I believe are reputable sources, I am taking these as first hand evidence. And pretty strong evidence too that hypenated is a no-no.

Oh by the way, regarding my last post, there was a second twit that stole my content. This one posted it up on squidoo. It did rank. I can’t remember whether on page 2 or page 3 but google has since slapped it.

Meanwhile, the original (or at least first discovered of the two twits) has edited out much of the verbatim, and added some category placeholder posts and currently ranks at 27.

So yeah, definitely go .net or .org, else tack on a surplus word before entertaining hyphens if you want google to treat you nice from the get-go.