Emd

I want to rank for 2 keywords. one for a major city, and one for a minor city.

For the purpose of this question, I will use the keywords "cosmetic dentist Los Angeles" and "cosmetic dentist Denver"

I want to rank for the major city as quickly as possible. The minor city, I dont care too much about but it would be nice if I could rank for it too.

Should I go with
CosmeticDentistLosAngeles.net and CosmeticDentistLosAngeles.net/Denver
or
CosmeticDentist.net/LosAngeles and CosmeticDentist.net/Denver

Which one would help me rank quicker? I am not concerned how good or bad it "looks" to humans. I am just talking from the standpoint of search engines.

None of them will help you rank faster because keywords in domains don't influence rankings the way they used to, so an EMD won't help you rank faster. If you still wanna go ahead with registering an EMD, CosmeticDentistLosAngeles.net and CosmeticDentistLosAngeles.net/Denver are what I'd recommend going with.

SEO Power said:

None of them will help you rank faster because keywords in domains don't influence rankings the way they used to, so an EMD won't help you rank faster.

Click to expand...

This is the correct answer.

They may however affect CTR in SERPs as the keywords in domains or url are bolded.

They may negatively impact your keyword density due to keyword stuffing.

For search engines, all four may look fine, but if you are looking for human eye satisfaction, the latter option would look more professional, using professions in the main domain, and cities as pages.

Fact is, EMD ranks better and faster but not without good links.

Even if you have an EMD and your off page SEO sucks a non EMD with good off site will out perform your site.

In this case, i suggest you prepare for both.

Make sure you load these up in majestic to check for spammy backlinks and investigate any prior content in archive.org. EMDs are often junk-laden so be mindful of that.

There is relevance to EMD's. It may not be what it used to be, but you still get the benefit of keyword relevance. I agree with a post above that it cannot be done without good backlinks. This is a factor with any website that is trying to rank in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. You need good backlinks.

EMD's make SEO super hard cause you can't build branded links without making them exact match. You're stuck doing all generic and URL, which a) looks suspicious and b) IMO is going to be part of Penguin 3.0's next target.