I have noticed with most of the micro niches i'm finding that there's been a huge amount of domain backlinks, but not many page backlinks. Is it worthwhile competing against sites with huge amount of domain backlinks (normally high authority sites), or can you pretty much get in front of most of time, since domain backlinks are not really specific to the keyword. I would think it wouldn't have much influence since most of these backlinks are not relevant to the keyword, so it wouldn't be a big factor in ranking for that specific keyword.
Domain backlinks tend to count for more than internal links. So it might be tough to compete with such a site. Strong link relevancy would probably rank higher though.
I know the relevancy of the back links are king but I'm not too absolutely sure about the domain back links rule. I believe what ever has the more targeted content will rule supreme when the search engine indexes it as a back link.