PostFor years a hyphen in a domain carried a whiff of spam. It's how throwaway sites and knock-offs often looked, so the cle…

For years a hyphen in a domain carried a whiff of spam. It's how throwaway sites and knock-offs often looked, so the clean version became the one everyone chased. Google's John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, keeps setting the record straight: hyphens don't help your rankings and they don't hurt them. Search engines don't favour clean domains or punish hyphenated ones. What actually moves rankings is the quality of the site, not one dash sitting in the address. So if the name you love is only free with a hyphen, that's a fair trade, as long as it still reads clean and people can remember it. That poor dash has been carrying decades of undeserved shame.