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My vote goes for 301. It makes more sense.

Agreed. Domain authority will play a significant role and more authoritative site may get away with it easier than a small one. I speak from what I have seen (not a speculation).

On a branded term you typically get quadruplets.

One of our clients did this once. We restored the robots.txt to original version allowing robots to browse normally and pointed a few fresh links to the site. The site was back in the index within a week. If your site has thousands or millions of pages that may take a bit longer. We found that discovery through links leads to better and quicker indexation than when you simply submit to Google. Get Google Webmaster Tools account and ensure that Google has clear picture of your site.

Not coming up for a term that is within your domain is not a good sign:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=spelenroulette&pws=0

At this point I am thinkiing penalty or ban, however ban is not the case as you still rank for an exact domain search:
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=spelenroulette.nl

Only 11 pages on the site (or indexed):
http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=site%3Aspelenroulette.nl

Your site seems pretty poor in content and purpose so it could be an algorithmically assigned penalty. The thing is that my dutch is not that great so I cannot evaluate (I am also not sure if the new algo applies to Holland yet).

Link command shows no links:
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=link%3Aspelenroulette.nl

You're in a very spammy niche and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of filter or penalty applied.

Search for: "spelenroulette.nl" -site:spelenroulette.nl brings 37 instances where your domain was mentioned (or perhaps linked) and they don't seem that flashy.

What was your link building style?

Google claims that nofollow links do not pass link juice - no matter what. If your tests show otherwise then Google is a liar (or they just don't know how they work internally). To my knowledge proper blog commenting work brings secondary value to a direct link from the page you're commenting on (scraped content links which exclude nofollow, citations, mentions, branding, networking...etc).

Honestly, no idea. What I would be "comfortable" with personally would be no more than 20.

If your network is not a secret then ensure that you have full and clear disclosure on the site(s). I remember Matt Cutts once said this as an answer to a similar question on YouTube. Private registrations are common for non-SEO purposes so Google cannot act on it alone. However if you have 1000 domains with private whois that may start looking a bit suspicious.

My vote goes for content creation, tools and features. A mini twitter contest-giveaway is not a bad idea either.

And here's the experiment: http://www.seomoz.org/q/experiment-facebook-page-vs-branded-domain

This is a followup to a Q&A posted by fideaux64 taking it from speculative to practical level.

Question: Can a popular social profile page outrank an exact match branded domain.

• Domain: http://erasethethought.com/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Erase-The-Thought/111096868913182
• Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/erase_the_thought

Results: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=erase%20the%20thought

This experiment is currently in progress. You're welcome to comment and participate.

Note: Please do not link to the main domain - only Facebook or Myspace.

After going through numerous post-algo update articles I find one price comparison site to have gone though unscratched - NexTag.com

Question: What contributed to their success? Was it sheer domain authority, content quality, unique toolset... or something else?

Any link will help relevant or not, just on a different level.

Note: If you start making "clever schemes" and mass link manipulation you may get in trouble if reviewed by Google.

Several times I allowed WP to manage page redirects and this caused no trouble. I cannot say for instances where you rename file more than once as it never happened internally.

Hosting images externally never had any impact on cases I had a chance to observe. The only problem I can think of is that you lose control over loading times or if somebody takes an image and links (credits) the image hosting domain instead of your domain.

Blocking a sitelink item does not remove item from index, only from sitelinks specific to your website. This allows Google to replace it with a different one (usually the next one in line of their importance scale).

This will not be problem from the penalty point of view - the question is if the page value. What is new or unique about the page that is also about the same topic?

On another note observe that Google monitors and warns about duplicate TITLE and META description tags in Google Webmaster Tools. H tag duplicates are not included. That would have to indicate that H tag is not as important to them.

I would go for a less cost and more linking domains given that they are all real sites. However it all depends what competition is like and whether you need authority or quantities (or both).

If you have triggered algorithmic penalty there is no other way to fix it other than removing the cause for the penalty. Only manually assigned penalties can be fixed by submitting reconsideration requests. Google makes the whole thing that much more difficult by NOT telling you what caused it. One of our clients had a penalty of this type assigned and we did the following:

1 - Cleaned up backlinks for paid links
2 - Removed variable driven repetitive text across all pages

It took 4 weeks for re-inclusion. We don't know what caused it, 1 or 2.