Does it make a difference if your url has a hyphen in it?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Zachary Toto: No, not to Google or any other SE, but general rule of thumb is to only use hyphen in domain if it`s part of the brand.
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  Wayne Cadman: Zachary Toto or if the domain you seek has been taken.Partial EMD domains are pretty good
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  Zachary Toto: Wayne Cadman The hyphen debate isn`t an SEO subject. As far as SEO is concerned hyphens are ok. The concern with the hyphen is more of a UX debate. This is why the general rule of thumb is to avoid it unless it`s part of the brand. Same with domain length. SEs don`t care about the size of your domain, more so about the content on the site.
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  Wayne Cadman: Zachary Toto no but the poster posted this around hyphenated domains for SEO. User experience is what I mentioned with the difficulty of pronouncing the domains.
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  Wayne Cadman: Zachary Toto basic SEO stuff yes
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  Zachary Toto: Wayne Cadman Right, it`s not an SEO issue. They were asking about hyphens being an issue in SEO, I explained that it`s not.
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  Wayne Cadman: Zachary Toto yes but please explain your statement "only use hyphen in the name if it`s part of the brand" it doesn`t make sense!
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  Michael Martinez: Years ago some aggressive marketers registered what we caled "keyword rich domain names", things like buy-my-spammed-out-affiliate-product.tld.They used every trick in the book to get those domains (often just doorways for their "money" sites) to rank well.Somewhere along the way Google said, "We see that most of these domains are not useful. We`re developing an algorithm that filters out the bad ones."Subsequently, some Web marketers (wrongly) concluded that having a lot of hyphens in the domain name was a very bad idea. From a usability POV, it`s not a good idea at all. But long, hyphenated domain names could still perform well if handled properly.It`s just that very few people would think to use such a domain name.As far as the algorithms are concerned, it`s what you do with the domain that matters - not what the domain name is.
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  Wayne Cadman: Michael Martinez and that is www.the-right-answer-to-the-question.com
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  Wayne Cadman: You can also point one domain at the the other
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  Ammon Johns: Hyphens in domains can help both people, and search engines, understand where one word ends and another begins. This can be immensely useful.One can understand that Scots-hits-on-vinyl.com is probably a speciality music store, while scotshitsonvinyl.com makes people think pretty badly of Scot. Yes, search engines too can pick out the wrong word from parsing strings of characters to find recognizable words.But, and this is really important to learn about domains, in the real world, brands tend to beat keyword-specifics every time it really counts. Search.com is a far older domain than Google.com, Books.com far predates Amazon.com, Shopping.com also predates both Amazon.com, Ebay.com, Etsy.com, AliExpress.com, and many more. Just the domain name for business.com and for shopping.com were each valued at hundreds of millions of dollars - by people who didn`t know better.In fact, the only market-leading domain I can think of with the keyword in the domain as a major feature, a clearly keyworded domain, is Pornhub. And that is, oddly enough, more from the fact that dirty jokes people tell use pornhub so that people can guess what it refers to even if not an aficionado of the market. Xhamster doesn`t sell small rodents and has done very well in the same market.Short, memorable, easy to spell domains that you can speak out loud over the phone or in word of mouth conversations have a major advantage with what really counts - people. Hyphens in the past were kind of up against that, as until the internet got everyone used to the term, many really struggled to know whether to call them hyphens or dashes, or whatever else.
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  Wayne Cadman: Ammon Johns great answer dude
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  Wayne Cadman: GIPHY