Choosing a domain name

[paolo]

This seems logical to me because how is google supposed to know how to separate them?

I don't expect Google to split joined up words, I was talking about hyphenated words - does Google not recognise hyphens as spaces in urls?

[Martha]

yes, it does, and doesn't seem to penalise them unless there are a lot of hyphens.

[Carsten]

yes, it does, and doesn't seem to penalise them unless there are a lot of hyphens.

exactly. Sorry Paolo, I missed your question, too many postings at the same time

[Martha]

On looking around more, it does look like many people say that google can't separate keywords in titles, unless they're hyphenated. This seems very odd to me though - it's not that hard to do and the top results for chamonix chalet have always included chamonixchalet.com and .net.

And, as always, not everyone agrees!

Perhaps if it's an obvious split, you're fine, but if there's any potential confusion, you should hyphenate.

[e-richard]

I'd hazard a guess that the reason chamonichalet.xxx feature highly in the searches for Chamonix chalet is because the individual words feature prominently in the BODY of the text and has nothing to do with the Domain name...

But of course, I could be wrong.
Says he with a place name unhyphenated in his own Domain !

[Martha]

Yes, there's so many factors, it's hard to judge. Certainly the .com doesn't have any other major seo on it. The cotent is not particularly optimised and they don't have tons of inbound links.

Well I just bagged chamonix-chalet.net anyway. (Don't quite know how I missed that one before!) We shall see. It might be handy, and it can't hurt.

[ravetildon]

I would not use more then 3 hyphens at the max.

You have to decide do you want to initially rank better using something like California-vacation-rentals dot com or if you want to create a brand name with a small url that is easy to remember like google dot com.