We have been preparing a few linkbuilding campaigns which includes evaluation of various white hat, high PageRank link-building. It turns out of course that the anchor text is important for ranking a site based on relevance. However in many cases the only anchor text that is allowed or used in various situations is the domain name itself.
Without having keywords in your domain name, link relevance is much less possible. Currently domain authority (regardless of relevance area) is seen as the more important ranking factor. This is akin to treating all professors of literature as able to identify correctly who are the experts in, say, nuclear physics. It doesn't work well and most blackhats tactics generally exploit the weakness. But this is a human weakness as well as a machine problem.
If people's names were the same as a given area of expertise, they would naturally be given some additional weight when it comes to that field. Mr. SEO Expert in Thailand automatically receives credibility in the named domain, regardless of actual expertise (in this case, a good amount ;D).
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[...] In a recent name Googling, the User page for a client came up as one of the top ten SERP results. Powerful. The reason was the enormous weight of Wikipedia, a fairly comprehensive and keyword-saavy User page and the fact that the User name in the URL was the term we Googled. This means the importance of the Username (as, say, a keyword or set of key or brand terms) is not to be underestimated, as was mentioned in the recent blog entry Link-building, domaining and why your domain name needs keywords. [...]