I did alot of looking and I notice one thing. Alot of the top 10 page ranks have to keyword in the domain.
Example look up the word Diet in yahoo and notice Diet is highlighted in like 90% of the domain names.

I also did another lookup "ny web deign" Seems it ignores NY bc its less than 3 characters but highlights webdesign or design in alot of the top 10 ranks.

Now it you search "new york web design" you notice 90% of the have one of the key words in the domain..

Does domain names have an effect on rank of the search engines?

Simple answer? Yes.

Computer-sales.com will be ranked higher (generally) than JoeBlowComputers.com when searching for "computer sales".

interesting... how about Computer-sales.com vs ComputerSales.com does the "-" help ranks or not

Well, I find that a lot of my tutorials come up when they are searched specifically. Obviously, they aren't the domain name. I think the site title has more to do with it. I use my forums for tutorials, and the forum sets the title for that page to whatever the post is.

Example: Search "photoshop bruises" on Google. You will notice "Bruising" in the top five, which is my tutorial title. After that I think my tutorials page comes up because it has "Photoshop" in the title and the "Bruising" tutorial listed on the page.

So, yes it does effect it. However, I don't think it is highly swayed one way or another because of it.

Another example is "sex". Sex.com does not show up in the top ten on Google. (To Mods: Sorry for using that website as an example, but it seemed like a good idea).

The simple answer is that domain names are taken into account when the search engine shows results. It is simply another factor that search engines take into account, just like titles, headers, keywords, etc.

The hyphen probably makes absolutely no difference, since the two sites will have differences in other factors (one might have more related keywords, or more popular, etc.).

This is so-so, SE take in numerous factors for ranking. They include but are not limited to:

Age of domain - A domain regged in say 2000 will rank better than a domain regged a few weeks ago.
Number of Links - If you have swapped links for Computer Sales which link to your site joeblowcomputers then you will rank higher.
Keywords
Quality Content


Hope this helps

J