what do I need to do to get out of this "SERP lock"?

Without looking at the site and the keywords involved, we can only offer generic advice.

I would suggest examining all aspects of your onpage factors. Some specifics are:

• page title: focus a single keyword

• header: focus the same keyword

• content: the first sentence of your content should also focus the same keyword

• site internal linking: when appropriate, other pages of your site should provide links in content to other relevant pages.

• url: clean, friendly, static urls which offer appropriate use of keywords is helpful

Wikipedia is a great example for many of the above steps.

There are other items to check. My point is link building and site promotion is an ongoing process which happens over months and years. On page changes have the ability to instantly and dramatically change your ranking. There is a good chance you are stuck due to onpage factors.

Search engines do not have any preference as to the extension used for your site. A .com has no advantage over a .net or .info from a search engine ranking perspective.

Users have a strong preference towards .coms. A .com site is viewed as a sign of legitimacy. If you take the name of almost any major company in any such as McDonalds, Facebook, IBM, BankOfAmerica, etc. and you add .com to the end, you wind up on the company's website. Even if you rank well for your site, some users are prejudice and are less likely to click on uncommon TLDs.

If you purchase a non-.com extension there is a high likelihood at times you will lose traffic to the .com. You can explain to users your website is watches.biz but a percentage of them will go to watches.com when trying to get to your website. This issue can impact your business.

With respect to the .xxx domain, I would not recommend acquiring that TLD for business purposes except to protect your brand. Many filters will likely block all .xxx TLDs.

My head is swimming with Matt Cutts videos which is not healthy. If someone asks "is it better to have keywords in the path or page name" my instant thoughts are "Alex Black"..."Green polo shirt"...not bald.

If you don't get the joke, don't worry. You are probably better off for it!

Adding hundreds of pages at a time is not a concern. There is not any reason to throttle the release of the pages.

The bigger concern is the quality of the content. The highest quality content often takes multiple days of a full-time person performing research, locating images, etc.

A helpful video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JByPymBtXFY