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Hi Barry, Excellent question - so thanks for asking. Basically, Google uses its search engine to determine when a "query deserves freshness". This often happens when certain subjects appear often in news articles, or there is a spike in search for a certain phrase, for example. When Google makes this determination, they want to serve the freshest content available. Often, these aren't the best sites. A bit of a sacrifice is made for speed and freshness over quality, in order to get the latest news. Some tips for optimizing for these types of queries: Keep an updated xml sitemap Make sure your timestamps are up to date Submit your content to Google news Publish your content via RSS Publish/Update your content frequently Broadcast your content on G+ as broadly as possible One of the best resources I know of for optimizing for these queries was done my Rand and Mike a few months back: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-freshness-update-whiteboard-friday Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Yes that's what I thought...

I agree with Cyle. If you link to other authorities, it makes you look like an authority. Basically Google says, "These people know who other authorities are, so that means they must be an authority too..."

Barry - If you are currently sitting at #2 for your keyword and refer to your existing sub-domain as 'very powerful', I would let this idea go. As Highland said, you stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. In addition, the search engines are slowly but steadily losing favor of exact match domains. Your potential upside doesn't outweigh the risks of this move, in my opinion.