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Yeah - ditto here. I tested DCMI on a few sites years ago, and I know folks who've tested more recently. We also looked at meta data of any variety in our correlation/rank analysis in 2009 and saw the engines appear to ignore everything but the known tags - description, robots, etc.

If you goal is to 301 all the pages of the new site to the old one, I would suggest to make the new site with the right pages for the different search terms you target, let it be indexed and ranked, get a few backlinks to keep the domain somehow "visible" to google. This process should take a couple of months. Once this is done, create a redirect script on the new site. If you want to rank deep pages of the old site, the script should redirect user to the page of the old site which correspond the best with the new site page. If you want to rank the homepage of the old site, just redirect all requests to this homepage.

Try the following search in Google www [dot] CompetitorSite [dot] com "Article" OR "Author" -site:www [dot] CompetitorSite [dot] com this should show you what they are doing (with the [dot] chnged to .)

Forgot to answer your beta question limit. No limit dude! Keep 'em coming. Yo'll know when it's too many when you run out of people to answer them

Hi Jeff: The following is half at, half science, but try pulling two separate but contiguous phrasesfrom the site which don't include the company name (even if Google smacks a site,  the site will almost always still rank for it's own name/brand unless it's JC Penney :). If it doesn't come in at the top of the SERP's (top 10) then it's a good bet it's been smacked. How is it doing in Bing? PS - Richard's got some great suggestions.

I do not have studies with me to prove (or not) if local hosting providers influences rankings... But I want to underline that is the IP location what counts, especially if we accept the idea that for Local Search Search Engines are looking also if the website is for real localized in the country it is competing for. That means, that you can also avoid a physical hosting in the country you are competing for, but you can host your website via proxy in the local country, as very well said Richard Baxter in this comment (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday#jtc132564 )to this WBF: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday Anyway, the most important is the domain termination, so - whenever it is possible - try always to use the country domain name termination of the geography you want your site rank for.