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Thanks Mike.  It is close to exact match, but I have always heard that is a very small ranking factor.  Also, the SEOmoz errors are all red and dup content. quote from dr. pete "Panda made duplicate content part of a broader quality equation – now, a duplicate content problem can impact your entire site...no longer an isolated problem" if there are 4k+ problems on one site that should matter right?

I guess I have just been running up to a lot of walls lately where sites are outranking other ones that don't seem like they should be.  For example if you google "sprinklers" sprinklerwarehouse.com comes up first and orbitonline.com comes up as the second to last SERP on the first page

sprinkler warehouse - 538 external links and 71 linking root domains

orbitonline.com - 744 external links and 117 linking root domains

I always hear and read that links from other sites is one of the most(if not the most) important ranking factors.  yet I constantly see sites outrank others that have less links.  any thoughts on why this would be?

I plugged a competitor into the campaign manager that is ranking #1 for many target keywords like "sprinkler parts" (18k broad, 720 exact) and "sprinklers"(550k broad, 4400 exact) and #2 for "sprinkler"(1mil broad, 8100 exact).  This site has over 8500 errors on SEOmoz - I have spent a good deal of time fixing errors on all of our client websites and have gotten them down to 0 errors.

I am just wondering if I have been wasting my time and if the errors that SEOmoz reports on even make a difference.  How can a site rank for such high traffic keywords when it has 4k duplicate content and 4k duplicate page title errors?  The site has 75 linking root domains according to opensiteexplorer.  any help on this would be greatly appreciated!