hyphen in domain name or downtime

[alethea]

Hi, two weeks ago, my website for it's main keyword was on the first page of google, and had been for a very long time. Now it is nowhere to be seen!Obviously I want to know the reason for this! The site itself has not changed and has absolutely no spam of any kind in any way. The only way it has changed is that it has moved to Bluehost. The other possible change is whether Google has gone crazy and decided every hyphonated site is spam!!! Now Alan from Associate Programs says he has spoken to the right person in Google and has been told that absolutely no way is Google now or intending on penalising sites with hyphens and treating them all as spam. However, in the scenereo of Google penalizing sites, I am told that they will allow sites with one hyphen. I have two. I have looked at the first three pages of google for my keyword and none of these sites has more than one hyphen, so I am wondering if Alan did not get the right information. If it wasn't google then the only other thing I can imagine is that Google came to spider me during one of the downtimes there as been during the last ten days or so while I have been with Bluehost. Can other people with more than one hyphen in their domain names tell me what has happened with their site. Is it still in the same Google page as before or has it changed?

alethea

[Arubalisa]

I do not know anything about hypens, but this is NOT a Bluehost problem. Since I switched my site to Bluehost, one of my sites for it's number one keyword, has actually improved from #19 to #10 or #11 for 150,000,000 English pages.

Google "big daddy" to find out about Google's latest overhaul. Matt Cutt's blog also contains some invaluable information. Sounds like your results have more to do with this than anything else. Also be aware that the "big daddy" overhaul is being done datacenter by datacenter, so results can vary greatly. May just depend which datacenter you are working off of.

[A.Gabston-Howell]

All of our domain names are hyphenated, and we're consistently in the top 10 Goggle hits for searches germain to the subject matter of our sites.

Definitely not a BlueHost issue.