This might be of some help:

http://www.keiths-place.com/blogs/keith/2008/sytimgcom-wants-set-a-cookie-err-who

Try adding &gl=(country code) to the URL at the end of the Google search query.

For example:

&gl=uk for United Kingdom

&gl=us for United States

&gl=au for Australia

Sounds like a waste of money. Simply pinging search engines is not going to influence how likely they would be to index your content. It may help discovery, but you can use free tools to do that (pingoat, pingomatic), Wordpress has the function built in.

Is there a site on the domain at the moment, or has there been one recently?

If there is you could see how well indexed it is (site: command), see if it ranks for it's own brand terms, and even moderately competitive terms.

You can also run the site through opensiteexplorer and see how dodgy the external link profile is.

Personally, I would omit the date. It unnecessarily lengthens / add folder structure to the URLs.

I also prefer removing the trailing slash at the end of the URL.

It's your call whether or not you change the existing URLs, be mindful to implement a 301 redirect if you go down that route.

These appear to be tools to check if the site has been black listed for email spam. While it's good to check for when buying a domain, it won't tell you if Google has penalised the site.

These links are not editorial earned but I have mixed feelings about them, here's why:

I don't have a problem when a designer ads one text or image link with their brand name in the footer, as long as the client is happy with it. If you've designed an awesome site that link may act as lead gen.

However, I have noticed designers getting a bit crazy with this and adding multiple (2,3,4 more) keyword rich text links (web design, web development, web deigners location etc etc) in footers which I really do have a problem with as they are only there for one reason. It looks spammy on the client's site and may actually get their site penalised.