Our site name is something like "no guts no glory" i.e. four very short words that are a common phrase.

In a domain name four short words look lost -- noeatnosoup.co.uk or norednofun.co.uk -- so we have no-eat-no-soup.co.uk (plus domain squatters are sitting on most of the other variants!).

But that is three hyphens and the site dropped in rank a few weeks ago despite having 10x more backlinks, PR5 (to everyone else's PR1-2) etc.

Is there a devaluing for having hyphens that increases with the number of hyphens? Our 10 year old site that has held excellent rankings for those 10 years, throughout all Google storms, just dropped several places some weeks ago. The same time this site dropped.

I've been running through the list of sites I manage and it certainly seems on the face of it that hyphenated domains have been hit recently.

Of course, my problem is that I won't be able to tell if hyphenated domains have been hit or whether it's just that brand names have been given a boost as most of my domains are keyphrases, not brand names like FunjiGiggler.