You have done everything under the sun to bring your site higher up in Google’s SERPs, but it just wouldn’t move. Now, an SEO “guru” is telling you that your domain name is the problem since you are using multiple hyphens, as so: www.multiple-dash-domain-name.com and that Google imposes a penalty on such domains. Should you register a new domain name with no dashes (or just one dash) and move? Is this a problem at all?
I am not aware of any “dash penalty”, so I don’t think moving to a non-dashed domain would help. Personally, I own a number of hyphenated domain names that do pretty well in Google and I know enough of people that do, too.
There was, at one point, a speculation that Google might be looking down on sites with dashed domain names because of all the spammers indexing keyword-rich names separated by dashes. But, I have never seen any conclusive evidence of any penalty taking place and there have always been plenty of sites with dashes that did (and still do) very well in Google.
Now, it is true that many multiple-dash domain names host spammy sites. After all, who in their right mind would register a domain name with 5 or more hyphens and try to build a solid online business on it? Google knows this and, therefore, it’s possible that hyphenated domain names get more attention from Google’s human reviewers, but I doubt it that there is any machine-imposed penalty.
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