I never said a hyphenated domain would get penalized. Simply not rewarded. How natural is a keyword focused hyphenated domain? Not very natural is it!
Take a look around at the SERP’s. You certainly don’t see to many hyphenated domains.

Also, read Matt’s posting to this very very careful:

“We don’t use hyphens as a spam signal. ”

I never said that a site would get flagged as spam. Simply that the site likely won’t rank.

I did ask Matt a few questions about my site at WebmasterWorld in November – He did not say that my keyword focussed hyphenated domain would be penalized but it would be wise for me to move to a new domain.

The problem, in my opinion, with this type of domain is that it likely gets caught in a “keyword stuffing” filter.

Think about this – To acquire the kind of inbound links Google is rewarding, do you think that an authorative site will link to http://www.keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.com – Likely not going to happen.

Now http://www.SomeReallyCoolDomain.com will stand a chance of attracting attention.

I have sites with a single hyphen and they do fine in Google however every site that has two or more hyphens does not do well. Again, nobody ever said penalty or spam flag – It is more like a lack of reward.

I think if Matt said too much on his blog about this sort of thing he might received his “First talking to from his employer”

I just got in from a 3 week trip to South Africa, so it is back to work for me too.

We are launching a .com.cn site very soon (actually online) and have a com.sg site. We have had some problems with duplicate content between our .sg site and our .com site in the Google.com index. The .sg site replaced the .com site or both the .com and .sg site dominated the SERPS for some main keywords. We implemented: a few months ago. Now there is very little corporate exposure in the local .sg index. A tag developed like .content=”archive.sg.only”> would solve this!

I am really trying to find out the best way to structure all these sites from a Google point of view. Are there any Google guidlines on this subject? We are expanding into Australia also and will eventually launch a .au site. Is it better to consolidate all the sites onto one server: .com/cn or keep them separate .com.cn?

You help would be appreciated.

Personally, I don’t think anyone should block the googlebot nor do I think anyone should be able to have any unfair advantage in attracting the googlebot, why not let google and the other bots spider and index to their hearts content, it’s a free world out there on the net!

All the best,
Mark

You might be interested in the thread in the Usenet newsgroup,
alt.internet.search-engines titled
“Any idea why Google would have removed this site from its index?”
started 6th March

A guy has posted about his translation site that looks as though it has just been hit by a penalty of some kind.
Whether this is anything else, like duplicate content or the fact he has multiple pages but in different languages I don’t know.
But it makes you wonder what can happen to sites that have pages translated in to numerous languages?

If a page is translated in to multiple languages, is there a possibility now that gogle is looking in to spam in foreign languages, that the site could be penalised for duplicate content?

If you would like to leave your email address here, I could also get in contact with you directly.

As long things improve for the best we’re willing to take some beating while the improvements are being made. Our fear is that Google may be neglecting lesser important languages in this update, like ours (although is the 4th more spoken in the world), and things may not work for the best. So far, both on BD DCs and other DCs, things look messy as hell, in our language (portuguese).

Anyway, we decided to sit tight for more 6 weeks (i’ve heard?) and see if it was worth the suffering and confusion.

HaHa, I know the Blogger folks sometimes read my comments, or I pass this info on.

Mac, there will be some differences in search results as people hit current data centers vs. Bigdaddy data centers.

One should not assume spammy tricks ARE the reason for a well placed spam page.