[nicb5]

Hi guys

Here is some information of interest concerning hyphens in french domain names. There are some mixed views on this and I will try to give you an unbiased honest opinion. Hyphens in french are not as bad as for english ascii domains, in fact they can even out perform non-hyphened domains. Why is that you say? Because some words in french are written with an hyphen. Take for example the word "Grandmother", in french that is "Grand-mère" and only that. "Grandmère" is not only regarded as a big typo, its not even a word! But be careful! Some people go and reg keyword combos with an hyphen and in that case, I believe it is as bad as an hyphen in ascii domains. Just be sure to search either a dictionary or a search engine with the whole combo in quotes. If you get more than say 300 000 results it is surely a word or a commonly used combo and you should be safe with that. If you still need more convincing, one of my best IDN performer is an hyphen seperated french word. It is not indexed in a SE and gets anywhere from 35-75 type-ins per month.

Thank you for reading. I'm hoping this will help some of you!
Be sure to share your views on this too!
Nick