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My client only sells to their dealers, not to the public. So, if I were a dealer, I would gladly link to the manufacturer who is working hard to provide better information about the products.

I am going to approach them about making a form letter to either mail out or email out and we can link them to a private page to get the badges.... see what happens.

I will most likely report my findings on SEOmoz

If you are already on the first page of Google with your new domain, whats the problem? Sounds like you were already headed in the right direction....

I couldn't have said that better James! Far too many SEO's refuse to link out at all and are missing out on the benefits!

I actually prefer subdirectories over subdomains.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

There is a good resource on the topic... there were a couple of good instances to use a subdomain, but it also said you wouldn't necessarily get the authority of the root (which you will with a subdirectory).

I was thinking this would be a good source for linkbuilding since the dealers already usethe product and are dealers, they should want to show it off... I would think.

So, if there are 1,000 dealers and I could get half of them to link to the manufacturers site, that could be a nice boost for my linkbuilding efforts.

They are already dealers, so we don't need any affiliate tracking, but I guess I could track it in analytics to see how well it works too.

Are they getting any traffic? Redirecting url's has zero SEO benefit (as far as I know), especially new domains.

If you are getting traffic, yes, redirect. If not, does it really matter? I guess if you already built links it wouldn't hurt to redirect with a 301.

I wouldn't consider myself an expert on this one, but I would have most likely created internal pages that have yoursite.com/keyword-phrase and optimize them, especially if the site already has some authority on the topic.

Pointing the new domains to internal pages won't do anything as they don't have any rankings yet, and you can't get any if they don't have any content (I don't think).

Just my .02

Any links are helpful, and for many reasons. No-Follow links help to diversify your link portfolio, if all links were followed, it would look strange to the search engines. Having a good mix is more "natural".

Same goes for getting too many links all at once, doesn't look natural.

I am a little surprised I didn't see any comments that mentioned making sure the content is actually link worthy on your site in question. If you start there it will make the rest of your job much easier.....

Link building is like all other aspects of SEO, no easy way, no fast track. Slow and steady wins the race.

Should you ask your dealers for links back to you?

For example, if you are a laminate flooring manufacturer, should you ask all your retailers to link to you?

If so, how do you go about it? Emails? A form letter?

Should I create a page on the site for banners and let them grab the code?

Any creative ideas would help.

Not all will agree on this, but I say linking out is good. But not because they link to you, if you aren't careful it will look like link exchanges.

I look at it this way, if the content I link to is relevant to mine, authoritative,  and will help the reader, then it is good for SEO. Period.

Personally, I don't like blogrolls, I think they are distractive to the reader. I would prefer to link to other content from within my content.

Hope this helps....