Do keyword-rich domains rank better in google?

Here we are not going to copy paste what Google employees said about the keyword rich domains but we will use an example. We checked this in October 2018.

We googled hotel Angouleme France. Angoulême is a city of France. We were looking for a hotel in this city. We discovered that two independent hotels of Angoulême called their domain after the city name. One is www.hotel-angouleme.fr and another one is www.angouleme-hotel.com. The first website is the one of “hôtel du Palais” and the second website belongs to a hotel called “Hôtel St Antoine”.

Their snippets appear among the first snippets of the page followed by other domain names describing the real name of the hôtel. For sure, booking and the national hotel brands (brithotel, accorhotels) are well ranked because they benefit from a branded hotel directory website. This means that keyword rich websites rank well. If I compare the ranking of independent hotel domain names with the name of the hotel in the domain name and those two domain names with the city as a keyword, I can see that the two keyword rich domains name perform better than the domain names with the hotel name. This means that keywords are important in the domain names.

I have notified Google about this problem in October 2018.