Further to this question we have two very descriptive domains like dog-toys.ie and dogtoys.ie and have decided we will now make one of them canonical, with HTTPS, and do a 302 from the other domain.
My question is which one to use as canon? Note, this topic seems to have been covered here before, but it seems people are asking what to register. We have have both domains registered and in use since 1999 with the dashed version parked on the non dashed one.
Doing a site:dog-toys.ie
in Google (4 times to cover both and www and no www for both domains) are all similar between 1,660 and 1,900 URLs indexed.
In Google Analytics, here are the comparative sessions over a recent period:
www.dogtoys.ie 183,410
www.dog-toys.ie 27,635
dogtoys.ie 8,403
dog-toys.ie 872
This may strongly suggest to go with www.dogtoys.ie, but I feel this may be skewed as if you land on dog-toys.ie, most of the links you click in will lead to www.dogtoys.ie
So, to summarize, of the two already registered domains, which if any, will be better for a search for Dog Toys?