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If you're a manufacturer that sells products, I'm not going to link to you no matter how good your content and how many bells and whistles you've got for promotions. However, if you don't sell products and you've got better content than I can provide on my site, I will link to you. I link to manufacturer sites when they have authoritative information that is beyond the scope of information I provide. For example, flame resistant clothing or fire rating information. If I want to cover my bases (ass) and make sure the customer has access to deep level information that is beyond the scope of what is necessary for a purchase I will link to it on a case by case basis.

Not everyone codes for different reasons. Dummies use html editors for dummies, so put me in that group. We use a CMS and have plenty of page 1 ranks. Sorry, but me and my kids don't live in an ideal world.

The quickest way I've found to boost mozrank and trust is developing good local optimization and submitting our site to directories. The jump in those factors happened relatively quickly - weeks not months.

Boosting the moz and trust ranks will help you rank while you build the DA with back links.

Interesting. So you were ranking well on a hosted platform.

A timely question. We've got a bunch of local.com backlinks that just showed up. All are no followed and the anchor text is "website." How nice.

Our domain authority dropped a couple of points (perhaps associated with this - who knows), so I called local.com several times about the backlinks. Still haven't heard from them.

I don't know if Google frowns on a littany of no followed backlinks from local.com with a bunch of spammy looking anchor text, but apparently, SEOmoz frowns on it.

My intent is to ask local.com if they can at least use our store name for anchor text. If they can't, I'd just as soon they give us 2 or 3 no followed links with our store name in the anchor text.

If they can't do that, then I'd be fine if they just get rid of the backlinks altogether. If they're going to give me some directory love, do it right. If they're not going to do it right, don't do it.

I've wondered and posted the same question here myself.

Last year at the time, feedback from reliable forum users was that there was no conclusive data to suggest that geo-targeting hurts national serp results for non-geotargeted keywords.

There are a lot of brick and mortar stores serving local and regional that would be hurt by this.

How do your domain and page authorities compare to those who are ranking well nationally?

Yes.

Your categories are very broad/general so have some good long tail keywords in your products to convert.

I'll add also that some of our geo-targeted keywords rank well nationally when the competition is not relatively strong compared to other keywords.

OSE does not produce as a robust/in-depth list of linking sites.

When I want to know what sites are linking to me, I look at GWT.

When I want to know the anchor text, domain/page authority etc of the links, I look at OSE.

Brand Labs does excellent work but you may suffer some sticker shock.

I recommend contacting Convergent 7.  They are right around the corner from you, are very experienced with Volusion sites, they know development and SEO.

Then, I'd also suggest joining their Volusion forum where you'll find a lot of seasoned expert Volusion merchants.

I think the feedback form is a great idea because what folks want in a dashboard is subjective.

I bypass the dashboard and go straight to the order page.

When I want to look at stats and trends I go to those respective pages.

If I could make a styling suggestion, allow the users to decide the default page (go to page upon opening) if possible.

Great stuff Thomas. Made some notes to self.