Good question - I have experienced something similar and I would personally go with your second location in a sub-folder as you say you have already established this site and you will be able to benefit from the authority already gained. I would place relevant anchor text including the location possibly in the main homepage navigation pointing to this second location. When I worked on a similar site I had three locations from one site and I placed the relevant terms in the main navigation anchor text and obviously did the other basics such as keywords in URLs. Then I concentrated on building the authority of each locations homepage, including using competitions to get social interaction to each of these and building great local content that I then exposed to the relevant local audiences. Each one of the location pages then started to gain more natural links from local sources and I found they all ranked really well for their local terms.

Hope this helps..

Hi Rohan,

You can use hyphens in sub-domains, however when using hyphens in relation to any domain or sub-domain I tend to stay away from them, if possible, as they tend to be related to spam practices, especially with multiple hyphens. I think you will find this SeoMoz best practice in relation to domains a good guide as to what is the best tactic to take - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

Hope this helps

Very interesting response Robert, with some very good and valid points - though I think you would want a expert in order to carry out that change, although that might not be the right place to find them - a very nice example of why hyphens, in the right situation, are very valid.

When you have worked with hyphens and domains what is the largest number of hyphens on an EMD you have worked on?

This has set off an interesting discussion in the office with the feeling that a domain with multiple hyphens is less trusted by the majority here when they appear in the serps, therefore receiving less click-throughs.

In general do you think users have been educated to be suspicious of domains that appear long and and exact match with hyphens and that is why it is believed to be spammy by some?

The most I have worked on in regards to EMDs with hyphens is one and this dominated the SERPs for the targeted terms.

Do you think EMDs with multiple hyphens possibly set off alarm bells with Google in regard to over-optimization rather than efficient labelling of a resource online, in particular since Penguin?

As long as the code produced is readable in a web browser then it being bloated shouldn't have much of an impact in terms of SEO. The code bloats only downside is that it might slow the page load which will have impact on SEO. Remember crawlers like Google bot essentially look at the page content in terms of textual content, what labels (alt tags etc), images and links are on there not how neatly it is presented or whether it is valid markup or not. I would take a look at your page speed otherwise I would worry as long as it is able to fulfil all the basic on page requirements such as headers, page titles etc.

Just to reiterate this - I have worked with CMS driven sites that aren't W3C compliant and don't produce the nicest html, but have loaded fast and ranked in the top 3 for competitive terms.

I completely agree with the fact that those of us that do this everyday aren't the best to ask in regards to this, though our office is a mixed bunch, not all marketeers.

In general I have noticed that more and more users that I have come across are becoming more aware of what they are clicking on in the SERPs. They are filtering results based on their own judgments, not just trusting the search engines as they may have done in the past. Though as you say with the growth of the last five years there is probably one hell of a lot of people that trust in the SERPs whatever they serve for a query. In relation to this suspicion; I think page titles and descriptions influence this more than EMDs.

It would be an interesting study to see the impact of hyphens(the amount) in EMDs and their click through rates from the SERPs.

As we have both attested, though, we have had success with EMD with hyphens, though this is obviously down to many factors in relation to SEO strategy we have employed, not just a good domain.

Thanks for your input it is very valuable.

Here is to the day that we don't have to make a domain registrar rich!