Basically the same as above; the description has almost no SEO effect apparently any more, but does have a measurable human effect since it will usually be displayed under your title in a search result. I've seen what you describe on my own pages, where Google will sometimes select part of the body instead of the Metatag, but I'm not sure if that's because they found an 'exact match' in the body text, they think it's better, or what.

I would agree, but not necessarily from an SEO/'Google will downgrade you' perspective. It's not exactly clear what effect the title has, though it very obviously does have an effect. However the title is often the first thing a searcher sees when they are presented with your link as a search result, which means to me that making them as 'human' readable friendly is as important as having keyword prominence. Mind you I'm coming from an ecommerce angle, where information about the product has to be communicated clearly in those 70 characters, it may be different in other categories.

As for the keyword stuffing and H1, yes those are definitely onpage elements that you should get sorted out.

It's certainly possible. I've some sites where the DA is nearly double that of anyone else in the category but they're barely on the first page. The thing to remember about the SEOMoz numbers is that they are a diagnostic, but not based on anything 'real' when it comes to what Google is going to do. This means that you shouldn't treat them as an end all be all indicator of what's possible with a web site or not. I've since deleted the campaign but I remember one case where the site I was working on had a DA of 65 and the number 1 result had a DA of 15.

I thought this was about micro-formats and schema.org content but after some looking around I'm not sure now. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on how those links appear, but I haven't been able to find anyone discussing it after 2006 or so. This was the best writeup I could find:

http://www.seobythesea.com/2006/12/googles-listings-of-internal-site-links-for-top-search-results/

Basically it seems to be that if Google has 'learned' your site thoroughly they'll arbitrarily decide to shove those links in there. The discussions I can find don't really suggest a way to do it, and some express frustration over controlling which links go there. The impression I get though is:

• Google SiteMaps are probably involved

• The sub pages are usually linked to heavily

• The sub pages are usually pretty 'clean', e.g. full of content

I guess it's comparable to what Google classifies as sub-results when you search for your brand name but other than that it's a mystery to me.

Isn't this more of a DNS question? Shouldn't it just go:

site.tempurl.com is an alias for newsite.realurl.com?

And then you change the base domain/config in WordPress so it never references tempurl.com ever again?