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It's listed right here in the Google Webmaster Guidelines:
"Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356
The guidelines also mentioned "excessive link exchanges" -- so what's deemed excessive? This is definitely a gray area.
I would nofollow the links just to be safe.
The best way to do this is to get your site syndicated in Google News. Google identifies real time/breaking trends for queries and often displays related news results.
Here's more info on Google News:
https://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2481358
I've had a couple of sites accepted in recent years, and am very familiar with Google's requirements. Let me know if you have any questions.
The perp hasn't downloaded and copied your site. He/she is using domain masking to point the URL to your site. Still, I would consider doing something about it a high priority.
Instead of Skype, why don't you download the PDF and upload it to your server, and then share the link. I'd like to take a look.
Personally, I would do it, as I'm always on the lookout for extra ways to market my services. There's also the networking factor, which can reap an endless stream of benefits down the road.
But all in all, there are too many factors to give a definitive answer. For example, how much time will the project require? Can you afford to work X number of hours knowing that the payoff may be gradual or may not come at all?
I would also avoid the link at the bottom of every page.
And on the flip side, there's the Harlan Ellison philosophy that seems to work for some folks 
Exactly -- take advantage of all the tools at your disposal. In this case, local results will be displayed more often than not. In a nutshell, you need to be setting up Google+ Local pages for the businesses you are working with rather than clinging onto the hope of competing with the big dogs for organic search position.
I don't have personal experience with Crunchbase, but company profile pages do have links to the companies' websites, which is certainly a good thing.
Your post leads me to believe you are getting organic search rankings confused with paid search (Google Adwords). Are you saying your campaign position in paid search has lost position? As Zachary pointed out, it seems unlikely you were ranking so high in organic search results for the keywords you posted.
The Enterprise option might work for that:
http://www.seomoz.org/plans/enterprise
However, I would get in touch with someone from SEOMoz to verify.
You may have success by requesting removal of the cached version of the page using the URL removal tool; however, I'm assuming you aren't the site owner, and thus do not have access to the forum's URL removal tool.
It really depends on the site. If it's a highly trafficked forum, it is likely crawled frequently. You may see it updated within the week. If it's not, it make a month or so, unfortunately.
This is primarily a concern for one author blogs -- if your main blog index page has a nice mix of posts from various authors, and doesn't match a lot of content from the individual author pages, you will be fine.
I highly doubt it...
WordPress powers roughly 54 percent of websites managed by a CMS, and approximately 15 percent of the top 1 million websites in the world.
Do you really need a dedicated server? Consider a VPS. Or if you want to stick with basic shared hosting, check out BlueHost (get the dedicated IP add-on).
I'm going to agree with all of what Adam Thompson said, less the social bookmarking part. Social links can be valuable as they can lead to an influx of traffic (depends on the content obviously). Reddit can be particularly powerful.
In addition to Koen:
You should also be able to do this via cPanel's redirect tool, providing you're file/URL structure is unchanged. If your file structure is the same, check the "Wild Card Redirect" box.
There is presently not an H1 tag on your home page. The process of adding such a block depends on your template. If you have a basic familiarity with HTML, you should be able to open the home-page template file in the WP file editor and add a main title to the home page. If you want to paste the contents of your home-page template file on pastebin.com and then provide the link, we can help you further.
Also, your footer link is incorrectly formatted and generating a broken link.
Site still seems to rank #1 for "Poker on a Mac" query. Site search reveals lots of indexed URLs from the Pharm hack. I recommend removing these URLs via Webmaster Tools. As far as investigating the traffic drop, take a look at your top landing pages via search for the week before and compare to the data following the drop on the 23rd. I bet you'll be able to find some sort of pattern that will enlighten you a bit.
I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of Google Tag Manager. The meta keyword tag is ignored except in cases of site search.
To OP:
Social media is going to be your main source of traffic here, IMO. It doesn't mean you should completely ignore natural search optimization, but that the best way to drive traffic to your site is through social media. The rankings will come with traffic/shares/backlinks.