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Talking from the experience, if the content is good, link profile is legit then EMD always help you stay on top as compare to competitors who are using brand names in their domain name. Hope this helps!

First of all I must Agree with Moosa. I also ran some experiments like this and by the use of hyphens (for instance separating 2 words with a hyphen in de domainname). Even though my better backlink profile, my higher DA/PA and my better content (more actual, newer, more words, less links in the text) The website still keeps outranking me. But for clients of mine I've been running similar test which in turn show that it is very possible to outrank websites without hyphens, stopwords or The in the URL. That's why I agree with Moosa. Keep running the experiment in stages and maybe even use your information to write a YouMoz post about it. Could be a very interesting read. Jarno

Thanks everyone, I went with the 301 redirect. Thanks again! Chris