Another thing, exact match Domains have ZERO effect on rankings in Google. From John Wu at Google...."Exact Match domains does not equal rankings for that keyword phrase".
Oh come on, you got to be kidding me.
First off, logic fail. If someone goes and buys "casinos.com", does it automatically equal rankings for casinos? No. It still needs content, backlinks, etc. to rank (hence
does not equal rankings). Does it have a bonus towards ranking for that term, assuming it isn't a low quality site? Yes it does.
Second logic fail, assuming any employee at Google is going to give you the full, complete, not-subtly-confusing, iron-clad truth about ranking. Not going to happen, ever. Sometimes they tell the truth, sometimes they lie, sometimes they tell partial truths, anything a Google employee has to say about ranking should be taken with a grain of salt.
As long as we're quoting Google employees and standing on it as unabridged truth ...
https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/251784203597910016
Minor weather report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality "exact-match" domains in search results.
Matt Cutts both implies that exact-match domains have had a bonus, and the bonus has been reduced ... but only for "low quality" domains. Also implied is that "high quality" domains remain unaffected, thus keeping whatever bonus they previously had.
I, on the other hand, believe Google employees lie as a method of preventing the SERPs from being manipulated.
http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-matt-cutts-smx-advanced-43906
Bounce rate and rankings? Matt says Google Analytics is not used in the general ranking algorithm. ?To the best of my knowledge, the rankings team does not use bounce rate in any way.? He tiptoed around this question a bit, choosing his words very carefully.
Why wouldn't they? It really is an awesome statistic for determining whether a page has quality. If a page has 90% bounce rate, and another has 70%, why wouldn't Google use that as a ranking statistic?
Of course they use it. But they don't want you to know that. Why? Because the next logical step is that if bounce rate has an effect, it can be manipulated. Google doesn't want it manipulated ... in fact, imagine the chaos that would ensue. If it were a proven fact that bounce rate had an effect on ranking, blackhats would start scripting searches on Google, consuming resources ... costing them money and having results manipulated (which they don't like). So, they lie about it.
Now here comes a guy forward and he doesn't have theories and guesses. He's got evidence. Working examples. An exact technique. I'll take that over pure guessing any day (and yeah, for as much as you name dropped Google employees and referenced white papers, you're still guessing).