Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?

[Ron10]

all the page titles  in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html

I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names.  Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized?

If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title?

If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct?  My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true?

Thanks mozzers!

[TheeDigital]

I would say use hyphens in the urls.  I've never known there to be a ranking difference and in my opinion it's a best practice to use hyphens over underscores or plus symbols, and for readability for the user I think hyphens make sense. texas-plumbers reads easier than texasplumbers to a user, and for Google I would think it's easier to discern.  Imagine some titles where words could make completely different sentences by separating them at different locations.  http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/ as some examples.

[David-Kley]

You can use either. Google looks at hyphens like a space. I think it makes more sense to use piping (|) for your page titles, as that is more common, although I don't think there is a penalty for either. Below is a link to Matt Cutts blog for using different punctuation in URLs, I would imagine the same applys to page titles.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
and from the webmaster tools blog:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/cBikmAXlXXo

Hope this helps! I would worry more about the structure and keywords than the separator characters.

[KeriMorgret]

In that example, there is not a hyphen in the domain name, only in the page name. A hyphen in the domain name would look like:

buy-cheap-pills-now.net

[MarieHaynes]

John Mueller from Google has mentioned that there is no penalty or demotion for using a hyphen.  However, be careful you're not keyword stuffing.