Are hyphens not a good thing in page titles?

[cyberlicious]

I am pretty sure hyphens are looked at as spaces no matter what programming language you are using for text purposes.  The On-page Report Card is not counting them as spaces in the page title, therefore, we're not getting the grade for having the keyword in the page title because it's divided by hyphens.

Is this a fix that needs to be implemented into the SEOmoz app or should I not have hyphens in the title or does it really not matter?

Up for discussion!  Thanks!

[SarahGoliger]

Hi,

If I understand you correctly,  you mean that your page titles look like "Are-hyphens-not-a-good-thing...", and that is definitely something that you should change. Search engine programming aside, this is probably not going to a good experience for your site users. It's different than what they're used to on the rest of the web, and will probably look strange to them and possibly discourage them from clicking in the SERP. Personally, I'd switch to just using spaces in my page titles.

[cyberlicious]

Yea, I just thought it was a bug in the app. I think we'll run some experiments on titles with hyphens for a month or so to see if it truly impacts conversions. Then we'll write about it!!! I think you are right though.