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1. Google stated it repeatedly and sticks to its decission: nofollow links are meant to tell crawlers not to follow the links. They don't pass pagerank and they won't influence your SERP rankings directly. Nevertheless, most nofollow links (comments, mentions etc) are great techniques for networking. Even if they won't have any impact on your SEO campaign, later on they can help you build partnerships, friendships and, eventually, they can lead to some pretty powerful dofollow links as well.
Best two things you can do are:
1. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools and then go to Traffic -> Search Queries. The keywords your site ranks for will appear within a few days after you confirmed your site on GWT.
2. Use a traffic tracking service and check if you get any traffic from search engines.
For detailed SERP reports on Google (including geo-specific reports) you should try www.georanker.com. As a registered user the tool allows you to crawl 100 keywords in each report.
Register on myblogguest.com and try contacting a few guest bloggers through the forum. 
Their guest blogging community is pretty big, I'm sure you'll find quite a few guest bloggers that will fit your topic.
Use phone verification. Much faster and much easier.
Using a PO Box address on Google+ Places is one of the big DON'Ts. Google is against using PO boxes and in most cases they can even figure out that the address you declared isn't the real one. When this happens your Google place page gets deleted. Submitting your business again won't be very easy...
If you ask me, the most successful fake products are books that sell the secret to happiness, money and success. Though you have to be careful and make a really weird product, or else some people might buy it. 
Is mysite.com a static page? Google values fresh content a lot, the fact that mysite.com/blog is a continuously updates with fresh articles can be an explanation for why it ranks better in search results.
Hi Diane,
This is a very legitimate question, especially since most SEO tool developers place pretty high price tags on their apps. Most tools require a monthly few between 100 and 800 USD, is it worth spending all this money on a tool? To answer your question you first need to look at what you are currently working on. Do you have the budget to finance 3-4 paid tool subscriptions/month? SEO tools are meant to extract data and simplify reports that can mostly be generated manually too. Do you have time to generate these reports on your own?
In my opinion the most valuable tools are backlink checkers and SERP analyzers, that can be used for link prospecting. Such tools as Opensiteexplorer.org use their own crawler and provide data that isn't available anywhere else. The monthly fee gives you access to that data, which can prove to be very valuable, if used correctly.
SEO consultant from Romania here.
In our country "massive" link building stopped being effective about 3-6 months ago. Of course, at some searches spammy sites still show up among the TOP results... which is something I can't explain up until today. Nevertheless, bulk link building doesn't seem to have any impact on new sites. It's equal to zero and in some cases it even has negative effects.
Most of my work is focused on offsite optimization, so here's my list:
1. SEOMoz: I like OSE and the rank tracker as well, even though it's functions are pretty simple.
2. Majestic SEO: especially their site explorer.
3. GeoRanker: I use it for more advanced SERP reports by tracking search results as they are displayed to users from different countries and cities (especially useful in my local seo campaigns).
4. Ahrefs: cannot live without it.
5. Linkdiagnosis: basic but interesting backlink checker
6. GWT: I've given up Analytics and all other Google products, GTW I still use on a regular basis for to configure sitelinks, check for backlinks and discover search queries relevant to my sites.
As far as I know last year Google started to penalize a great deal of cc TLD sites, since most of them were web directories and spam sites. TLDs are becoming less and less important, nevertheless I think using a cc TLD won't add any extra value to your SEO campaign..
Greetings,
I checked your website with a few tools and the PR is indeed N/A. PR penalties are usually related to selling/buying suspicious links. You should take a look at your backlinking structure and see if there's any weird domain that links to you. By "all other sites" do you refer to websites that link directly to access.de? If these sites lost their PR too, they might be the source of the penalties.
Did you add your website on Google Webmaster Tools? I'd wait a few more days to see if there's any change to your PR or if Google sends you a notification for unnatural links.
For me it consisted in explaining to clients that it's absolutely impossible to offer them any fixed deadlines and clear results. Most of them expect me to say something like: "In 3 months your website will appear among the first 5 results in SERP". During the past year more and more of these people came to me.
What I will do to overcome this in 2013? The same things I did this year as well: keep calm and patient and try to explain to each and every client why I can't predict search engine behavior with 100% accuracy.
First of all I'm curious why you want so badly to improve your Alexa rank. Alexa is deprecated, highly impartial. It calculates traffic through a toolbar only very few people have installed on their browsers. You can grow your Alexa rank (artificially) by finding masses of people who use the Alexa toolbar and ask them to access your site. Nevertheless, I don't know what good this will bring you.
Take a look at KeywordSearchRankings.com - the tool monitors Google SERP rankings as they are displayed in almost any country and city in the world. It also has a "custom location" feature, where you can type in the exact cities from which you want to check rankings.
Greetings,
I can only see two ways out of this dilemma:
1. You convince the site owner of the importance of having unique content and, based by the budget he offers you, you hire someone to rewrite product descriptions or just add some default paragraphs to each product. Starting a blog on the same domain and constantly updating it with fresh and unique articles might also be a good idea.
2. You try to get away from your client, before he'll get the chance to blame you for ranking droppings. People who don't understand the importance of unique content are usually the people who don't understand what proper, white hat SEO actually is. These are also the people who will probably blame you for future traffic changes and sales droppings.
Of course they are important, they are among the most important means for solid online relationship building. Regardless the link type (dofollow/nofollow) , interesting and ontopic comments will always make the blog owner curious about who the commentator is, what he does and what other articles he writes.
Xnumrtik pointed out a very important aspect here. Associating your website in GWT with one country will definitely boost your rankings in that country, but it will have no effect on your SERPs in another country.
Make sure to associate your website with the targeted locations in any possible ways:
These are just a few starting points...
There are also a few programs that can automatically check a few things for you (headings, inbound links, metas etc). One such tool is seo-report.co.
dofollowforums.org? Starting a link building campaign with building forum signature links is NOT a wise choice. If I were Google, this is where I'd start checking for "bad links"...
What is the biggest mistake you made with one of your SEO campaigns? When did it happen? What were the consequences and what did you learn from it?
Trusting one metrics or the other is not the right question to ask. There's no such thing as a perfect tool for measuring domain/page authority. Combining multiple metrics (not just PR and SEOMoz, but data provided by other tools as well) is what helps you understand the real value of a page.
Even though you seem to be a little against it, the first thing I would do is report their nasty link farms. Sooner or later the algorithm will get smart enough to detect link farms by itself. There's nothing wrong with speeding up the process.
As for the rest of what you can do, most tips I had were already listed by others. In spite of all the algorithm changes, content is (still) king. The best thing you can do is create as much content as you can.
Hello Vanessa,
I recently discovered a tool that might also answer your question. It's called KeySR (keywordsearchrankings.com) and it was launched a few months ago. Basically the tool crawls search engines from almost any location in the world and reveals Google search rankings as they are displayed to any user from that specific location.
Even though my answer comes a little late, I hope you'll find it useful.
As Mat Bennett already mentioned, the information provided by Alexa is way to impartial in order to provide any relevant information.
As for PageRank, in correlation with other metrics it's useful to find out if a website was penalized due to suspicious link schemes or link selling. For example, if a 2-3 year old website is linked through tons of good quality links, yet it has no PageRank, then there's most likely something rotten with it.
According to the updated Google Webmaster Guidelines, widget links and frankly all sorts of paid/advertising links are ONLY accepted if they contain the nofollow attribute.
Here's the exact paragraph that clarifies this issue: "Note that PPC (pay-per-click) advertising links that don’t pass PageRank to the buyer of the ad do not violate our guidelines." -according to Google, almost anything that passes PageRank is suspected of violating their guidelines. (source)