Should I buy a hyphenated domain name, and if I do, what effect will it have on my search engine rankings when compared to the non-hyphenated version of the same domain?

Well, in the good old days when people used to 'point at aeroplanes' and when wheels were becoming a little more circular, search engine spiders found it difficult to parse or sort out individual words from multi-word domain names. Some were better than others, and the surefire way around this was to buy the hyphenated version to give Mr Yahoo a flying start.

Nowadays, search engines are far more advanced and are able to separate the individual words in domains proficiently, and so the main reason to buy a hyphenated domain is when the non-hyphenated version is not available.

Be aware though, that if you intend on branding a hyphenated domain name and spending money on promoting a website using it, you are likely to lose some traffic to the non-hypehenated version as many people forget to add the hyphen.

You have been warned!