Observation made by analyzing Competition

[GeorgR.]

Once in a while there are b****rds which have better Google rankings than i have. Often, what i observe is against ANY LOGIC...

I see un-finished sites which still have the "This is a wordpress blog..." default texts in it, sites which seem to be made extremely sloppy in 2 mins or less...

When i analyze links (using linkdiagnosis.com which is VERY good) i often see a pattern that such sites rank high because MOST (if not all) their links are DoFollow and they dont have one single "NoFollow" link.

While i was always thinking that link-diversity is good (both DoFollow and NoFollow)...this almost leads to believe that NoFollow links are actually bad.

As a side-note...in the recent month(s) i noticed that Google seems to give a HUGE preference to "keyword domains"...much more than it did in the past. Looks like that your domain being KEYWORD.com is almost certain guarantee for top ranking again. Anyone noticing this?

[Bryan V]

In regards to having the exact match domain, I often find such sites being ranked on page 3, 4, 5 and lower vs others that are variations of the exact match domain. This is for medium to low competition keywords. They must be slacking in terms of SEO. There's probably a good boost to the EMD but definitely not a guarantee for top ranking.

[maryparker]

Doing a basic Google search on a keyword will show you how many web sites you are going against. Another thing to look for is if the web sites that rank on the first page are ranking with the top domain or with a particular page. A particular page is much more easy to analyze then a top domain in terms of how they are using the keywords and what backlinks do they have to that specific page. If the top domain is ranking well then you should try and find out more information about it, like : how many backlinks and from what anchor texts and what web sites, how many pages on that web site target the keywords in titles, URLs, anchors and text and so on. Automated tools are really helpful to help you get a much more accurate image of the competition’s web sites.

[NeilC]

Getting good rankings with exact match domains is nothing new but it doesn't always mean you'll get on the first page just because you have the XMD.

Competition levels and SEO play quite a large part in how successful this can be and the way you build links also has an impact, there are certainly plenty of strange results in the serps though.