All profiles are natural until you intentionally do link building. That is a good question you ask, everything we do is to help our site rank better in Google. The problem is the Google has a monopoly and runs the show, so they are the ones who make the rules (which change constantly as they refine and as SEO's attempt to exploit I.E. pagerank sculpting) and war has been declared against link buying and selling. You have the right to do whatever you want on the web, but Google owns Google and has the right to show what they want on the web. Since everyone uses Google you have no choice but to play by their rules and their rule now is if you get caught link building we will take action. Link build if you like, but you better know what you're doing or you will harm your business or worse your client businesses.

It all has to do with quality, nothing to do with speed.

Google won't punish a site for going viral, but they will punish a site for manipulative link building in an effort to manipulate ranking positions.

You can add a couple of signals such as meta language tag globally

and also in the footer make sure you have your address listed globally on the site, UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, whatever variations you can include are all hints to Google as to where your business is.

Also, I agree with Robert, worry about the behavior of your qualified regional traffic  and not cutting off traffic from other regions just because of bounce rate and time on site. I'd personally prefer the traffic and visibility.

  is seen as

My opinion would be that if you are wanting to rank for "funkybrand shoes" I would not want any characters other than a space between the two keywords, and therefore I would not include it. There really is no reason to include it either unless it is a legal issue.

Have you called the hosting company? They may say that you need to switch to a Linux box, and they migrate everything over for you. Or maybe they can help you get your redirects in place on their end.