[eastCoastAlan]

I've recently compromised and started using a hyphen in my domains. Any ideas on the potential downsides for this? It certainly helps with finding reasonable .coms without resorting to dropping vowels or weird spelling combinations.

[majc2]

The guys on the fizzle show recently opined that you shouldn't use hyphens. From memory, the reasoning was mainly based on the domain being slightly harder to share (try saying your thing with the hyphen in it).

Source (c. 41mins in): http://fizzle.co/sparkline/pick-right-domain-name-11-domain-...

[driverdan]

I like the phone test. You should be able to tell someone your domain over the phone and they should understand what it is without any clarification. Hyphens and misspellings fail this test.

[Fuzzwah]

ex-ample.com

"eee ex hyphen ample.com"

Does this fail your test?

[olalonde]

I recall reading that hyphenated domains were penalised on Google but I have no idea if this is still true.