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Half our domain contains a very prominent keyword for our business. The second half is less so prominent. Few to none would use a search exactly like our domain name to find our services.

Did you ever consider moving your site from www.k-w.com to www.kw.com after you bought it?

This is the second part of my quandary - even if I pay the $24,000 that is being asked for www.kw.com, I still have to consider whether constantly quoting to people 'oh it's www dot keyword hyphen keyword dot com' is worth it, and whether the negatives of having a hyphenated domain outweigh the negatives of losing rankings for ages by moving.

This is moving away from the original question a bit, and though I'd love to discuss this with you further, I understand if you don't have time.

Oh, easily. But you do make me think that, if we do continue to growing as we are, if we don't pay for that domain, somebody else might do.

Our site does come up in Adwords, but only with 12 monthly local searches. We are also shown in the instant search menu.

I may, like you, have to be held to ransom for the non-hyphenated domain ...

Thanks for your response, I appreciate it Do you think many people still type in longer domains like ours?

I'm finding it really hard to get any data on searching vs typed in domains. I feel like it should be out there but somehow, I'm missing it.

I agree, unless you give people an obvious reason to type the ad-specific address, I imagine quite a few people will just type the domain and strip off the /ad (or whatever.)

The following example is exactly analogous to our situation (site names slightly altered

We own www.business-skills.com. It's our main site.

We don't own, and would rather avoid paying for, www.businessskills.com. It's a parked domain and the owners want a very large sum for it.

We own www.business-skills.co.uk and point it to our main site.

We don't own www.businessskills.co.uk. This is owned by our biggest competitor.

We also own www.[ourbrand].com and .co.uk, and point them to the main site.

My question is - how much traffic do you think we may be missing due to these nearly-but-not-quite URL matches? Does it matter in terms of lost revenue? What sort of things should I be looking at to get a very rough estimate?

I've had a look at your backlink profile and it doesn't look very natural. The great majority of the links to your site have the exact same anchor text: 'victoria falls accomodation'. This may have tripped a spam filter, resulting in your getting a Google penalty. The precipitous nature of your decline further points to being penalized by Google.

You need to look at your backlink profile (use Open Site Explorer) and see if there are any real editorial links in there. If there aren't, and those sites are mostly paid links, that goes a long way to explaining why you've dropped (the advertising with the 'dofollow' links will look rather similar to linkspam).

If by 'high-quality sites' you mean sites which have no purpose other than to let you submit articles for links - Google's Panda update greatly reduced the effectiveness of links from these sites.

A simple rule of thumb is: does the site I'm looking at have any relevance to human beings? Will they derive real value from the content on this site? Sites that let anyone submit anything without any real editorial discretion aren't valuable to users, and so they're not valuable to Google.

There are many kinds of good quality sites. One good source are online magazines and blogs in your sector. If you want to be accepted by a high-quality site, you've got to have high-quality content to justify that. The extra work involved in trying to get a good piece of writing accepted to a respected blog or website is worth it, as many an SEO can testify.

Best of luck

My company has a number of resources pages that are garnering links from external sources. It won't be long before these links outnumber the breadth and the quality of links to my homepage and commercial pages.

Does having a lot more links to the resources pages risk unbalancing flow of PageRank around the site? What I want to avoid is a situation where my homepage has a lower PR than my blog/resources, or people searching for relevant terms getting directed to my blog/resources (with many high-quality links) than to my commercial pages (which will have fewer).