Originally Posted by Snagglepuss

Thanks Geirlur.
I did some research and this is what I have found out. On hyphens. Well the majority view is that it doesn't hurt in most cases, at least as long, as you say, you don't use to many. Buuuuuuuut I read on thing where these guys had a contest for google rank. The guy that lost had a hyphen in his domain and random generated nonsense for content. So it was assumed that was why he lost. So for the hell of it they switched the content and low and behold the site that now had the nonsense content and no hyphen still won so they concluded all other factors were the same and the hyphen was causing the lower rank.

Conclusion. The hyphen will cause a slight downgrade in rank. I base this on a gut feeling, Namely they are used more to spam than non hyphened domains so Google has to know that. But I emphasize slight. So if you are competing for a popular one where every little tenth of a point counts don't use. For what we are doing it probably won't matter to much. If I need a hyphen to get particular keywords for a site I don't plan on putting tons of work into I'm going to go for it.

On the sub-domain. I'm less sure about this so would appreciate someone more knowledgeable to pipe in. The main thing I see is it ties all your sites together. So don't put a spam site next to one you plan on putting sweat and tears into. What other effects I can't say at this point.