As I said many times, I am no expert on this, but I only have one site in mind that uses the hyphen, and when I looked for it, it came up really within the firts 10 searches in Google, so I don´t think it affects too much when the name has a hyphen. But again, I was looking for something very specific that was the name of a newspaper in South America, so it was fairly easy to find, while I think that in the case of more generic names might be a problem.

I totally agree. I myself like the hyphen but when searching for a randomn site I will admit to being more likely to just type the whole thing straight and hoping a website appears.

I want to buy a domain for my favorite basketball player. The .com and .net are already taken. I'm thinking of buying a hyphenated domain instead of buying the .org and .info. Do you think the hyphenated domains is a better idea?

By the way, I'm not buying the domain for revenue. I just want to try my website building skills and I want to get a search engine rank.

As far as domain value goes, hyphens lower value.

The top 3 extensions, in order from most valuable to least valuable are: .com, .net, .org... and the .info comes in somewhere 4th-8th place.

So, I would probably go for the .org instead of hyphenating the .com.

On the other hand... value isn't concretely fixed. So although an appraisal company might devalue hyphenated domains MORE than they devalue .org extensions, the appraisal might not be accurate. Some people might prefer a .com in any case, even with a hyphen.

Personally, I would get the .org because I agree with the posts above in that users prefer to type .org than to type hyphens. I have a .org celeb domain that gets about 80 type ins a month, and it's not even only the celeb's name (it actually consists of Celebname+Otherword+.org). I am pretty sure that the hyphenated version gets less traffic.

In terms of SEO, there is a lot of debate about the impact of hyphens. I think that in general, the smaller search engines are helped by hyphens. For the larger ones, it dosen't matter. Since you will get most of your traffic from Google and Yahoo (I hope), using hyphens and not using them should amount to the same.

__________________
Sig: Before I post on Domain Social, I read the rules!

Thanks for the reply Zach. I'm sure that the info you shared will help me in my decision making in future.

It's nice to hear that you get type ins with your .org site. I have not thought about type ins. I'll definitely go with .org then.