Who needs Google's sandbox when you have an exact-match domain name?

The success of my own firm, HRSEO, has sparked a handful of copycats. Most notably, a firm with the domain HRSEO.co.uk has sprouted.

Now, this site has zero going for it, except its domain name, but when doing a search on Google for HRSEO, this site is a Top 30 result in 20,000-plus search results.

Aaron touches on the phenomenon as well on his blog.

For this reason, sites like Recruiting.com are so formidable a term when ranking for a keyphrase as competitive as "recruiting," even though much older sites like Electronic Recruiting Exchange, ESPN or the Army rank amongst it.

No doubt the backlinks going to a site like Recruiting.com with the keyphrase "recruiting" in it are a huge benefit. Another example, a site like ClevelandJobs.com can rank so well for "Cleveland jobs" in big part because of its quality backlinks from Yahoo! and DMOZ.

However, if a site is largely compiled of affiliate links and AdSense code, your chances of top rankings go down considerably. For example, a search for "Michael Jordan jerseys" fails to serve the Web site www.michaeljordanjerseys.com in the top results.

That said, if you can get an exact-match domain for a particular keyphrase you want to target, it's a good investment. For example, this site owns www.searchengineoptimizationjobs.com, but has yet to take advantage of it, a la the strategy outlined above ... yet.