In 2011 Matt Cutts advised that Google does limit on redirect chains - he indicated the Googlebot won't follow more than around 3 or 4. No limit on the total number of single-level 301s.

In your specific situation I would redirect both the original and the first replacement to the new replacement so that users and bots can reach the new page in a single redirect hop.

Once upon a time it was possibly a good use of the meta description to include some salient structured data but today we have a proper way of marking up structured data. The meta description is best used for compelling, relevant copy to attract the user to click through to your site as the meta description is your one best hope of affecting what is shown to the user in the SERPs.

Search engines haven't shown any inclination to parse the meta description and I doubt they would do so in future. Structured data belongs in the document itself, marked up accordingly.

Some years ago people used to make this claim about W3C validation badges too. A badge is a badge is a badge. It really is unlikely to affect your search rankings one way or another.

Interesting question. The Government of Hong Kong uses standard Chinese in simplified characters on its website while the population largely speaks Cantonese which is now found in a written form frequently used online and in social settings.

I suggest you have a look at Google Trends for Hong Kong and see if the bulk of searches are being made with simplified characters or traditional characters. The demographic your website will be targeting will also be a factor.

Shawn, a quick question to open up possible avenues: did you extend the Flawless theme or use it as-is?

Michael has it right. Online Agency (onlineagency.com) build websites for travel agencies. In the URLs you gave, Patrick, you can see some sort of ID for the site (starmandstravel.com). I guess that this content.onlineagency.com subdomain is the content management system to allow the travel agencies to update their content.

Google may be interpreting lots of similar/related websites on the same infrastructure as an attempt to game its algorithms (they have the same nameservers, although different c blocks but many of the other sites built by that agency also share the same c block [..170.140]).