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Also check out these posts from Search Engine Roundtable. There have been reports from the past few months about Google not listening to what you write for your title tag. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

Consider posting excellent content in a dedicated area of the merchants site..... great articles such as... "How to select a mountain bike tire for sand, mud, rocky, road or leaf litter surfaces" "How to change a mountain bike tire in 60 seconds" A sporting goods site could have hundreds of these articles that answer common customer questions and demonstrate expertise and credibility.  They also sell products such as the tools needed to change that tire. Mountain bike blogs will link to these articles individually or as a collection if you have done a great job.  Ask them to write one for you and they will link to it bragging (and you get free content). These will be articles with lots of photos, quotes from experienced riders, short video and more.   They can attract links from mountain bike clubs, manufacturers, bloggers and more.

1. How can I gain on the domain authority front? (more diverse links?) I believe that the authority of your domain is more determined by who is linking to YOU rather than if you are linking to a few blogs in the sidebar. 2. Should I no-follow the links on their blog so they don't have hundreds of pages with the same links (most internal) on there site Why not just remove those links from the sidebar of the post and category pages.  They would still display on the blog homepage but not on the many pages inside.  If you have wordpress this can be done by defining an alternative sidebar for those pages.