Keyword domains used to be a lot more powerful than they are right now.   Based upon watching a lot of their rankings, I believe that Google turned down their value in early 2011 - shortly after Matt Cutts said that their value would likely be turned down.   Maybe they will do that again, I don't know.

I agree that some of these sites rank well with very little content and poor user experience.  That generally occurs where competition is rather low in Google or where it is low to moderate in Bing.  Where competition is high a domain only makes a fractional contribution to the rankings. So when you see them ranking well for highly competitive terms they are doing the same type of SEO as any other site with poor onsite assets.

I own several keyword domains.  Some of them have top rankings for their exact match query and some of them don't.   There is no special formula for beating them.  Just compete against them as you would any other domain.

If you ask me the bigger problem is google giving easy top rankings to weak content on ehow, about, wikipedia and other powerful sites.

How hard is it to get these very annoyingly favoured domains off 1st?

This really seems to bother you.  But if you turn that around you would consider them to be a huge asset.  So, maybe you should just go out and buy one.  Find the guy who owns one and ask "what will it take for you to sell it to me?"... or hire a pro to do that for you.   I've done it a few times and am happy with most of the results.  They seem to produce a higher conversion rate too.

Nobody knows for sure but I am betting that diminishing returns begin at about the second link.

However, if you are getting links from the Pope's site then you can probably get an awful lot of them before the value depletes to a really low level.

Thanks Matt!  That makes sense.

Matt,

What do you think about humorous video?  That would be great for getting links and attention... but would that attract customers?

"I am working with a pest control company that is looking to branch out into social media.  Their primary goal is to connect with their existing customers to improve retention."

I don't think that the average person is looking to link up with and stay connected to their bug guy about  bed bugs, rat droppings and flea problems.  They want a bug guy who will fix that problem silently and get out of their space ASAP.  If bug guy can do that then they will call him if they ever have another problem.

My message to people would be that we fix your problem quickly and with minimal visibility.

Posting about bugs on a daily basis gets pretty boring.

ABSOLUTELY!

I would go with informative content that people can share when conversations arise.

There is no standard answer to your question.  In addition to Mcarle's great answer, you can see what the creator of an image has to select from here...  http://creativecommons.org/choose/

If you simply move a site from Server A to Server B or from Hosting Company A to Hosting Company B there should be no change in your rankings.

Sometimes slowness is not the fault of the server or the host.  There are lots of things that you can do to speed up your site.  These include: optimizing images, removing code bloat, caching pages on the server, reducing the number of files called per page, and much more.

We cut average load time by nearly two seconds per page by doing the above.

If you are calling in widgets, images or data from other domains they can really add to your load time.

I have 301 redirects on my sites.   Every one that I have done is still out there in htaccess.  I am not taking chances on how search engines handle these.

Other than deleting useless pages, I rarely change URLs.  If I don't change URLs I don't have to worry about this stuff.

I have not emailed other sites to change the URL in their links.  I have only changed the URLs on my own sites.  I would worry that asking someone to edit a link might result in a loss... so I am happy with the redirected link.

Let's say that my website has ten links to your old URLs that deliver hundreds of visitors per day.

What will happen to all of those visitors if  you remove the 301 redirects?