The two or three main reasons I've ran into for sites not ranking for their own branded searches are...

1. The site has way too little content -- a couple of pages less than 200 characters per page.

2. The site is very new and in none of the Webmaster Tools

3. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

4. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

5. https://webmaster.yandex.com/

6. Or the brand is a generic word that is reasonably competitive.

As Sam mentioned above, with more details the community can get you a much more definitive and nuanced answer.  Within your social profiles make sure you're linking back to your site and if your site has a physical location make sure to optimize via local search as well.

As Leonie states, the search engines are for public facing content. If your site is completely private then you'd be more interested in making sure it's not found anywhere other than by members, however it sounds like you have some aspects of the site that could be public or created to attract new members. Typically in these cases you pull small topical samples from the site that are shown to benefit the members and help articulate why membership is valuable.  It may be a matter of having what is practically like two sites: the public facing, membership recruitment site, and the private, non-indexed membership site.  Cheers!

Yes, there was a period when footers were getting extremely large (and link laden) in order to try and drive as much link strength as possible to internal pages, and this was spread out through out the site. Here's a blog post from a couple of years ago that looks into it even more thoroughly: http://moz.com/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond. But both Moz and Zappos have thinned down their footer links though from even this example. Rand also goes into general home page design (and why people have moved away from keyword stuffing on it) here: http://moz.com/blog/what-should-i-put-on-the-homepage-whiteboard-friday, which also helps get to footer links in a round about way.  Cheers!

That's pretty far down the list of things that would improve your site's rankings so I'd ignore it at this point. Plus, you'd be redirecting a new creation that would have nearly zero rank value.

Instead I'd focus on getting links from a greater diversity of locations (more internationalization) and try to get some great PR as well. Plug your competitors into OSE and see where they're beating you in the numbers there as well as securing links from sources you're missing via the Link Intersect tab in the Link Opportunities part of OSE.  Cheers!

A few days plus ~100,000 decade's old pages in Google is usuallynot enough time to see a change. You can spot check the 301s and run a fetch / render from GWT to see if the changes should be working though. Other than that, you'll probably have to wait a bit longer.

Within IIS you use the IIS Manager. Here's a blog on page-by-page: http://www.proworks.com/blog/2010/02/11/adding-a-301-redirect-in-iis-for-individual-pages-with-non-aspx-extensions/  It's older but still applicable.

There's also software available like ISAPI_rewrite that can help with the process if you're migrating between Apache and Windows servers: http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite

The Windows doc on this: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6b855a7a-0884-4508-ba95-079f38c77017.mspx?mfr=true

Right. It's kind of a combination of categories you want to rank for and ones that are populated and active enough to rank. Brand C Shirts would be fine, but Brand C Short Sleeve shirts could be too diluted. You're on the right track.

Also, there are some instances where the Moz tool just doesn't align with what you would not consider duplicate content and in those cases feel free to ignore it, especially if those pages are ranking well and performing well in terms of conversion / funnel.  Cheers!

Meta description will be what you write as the suggested description for Google to display in the search results, but Google will often rewrite the description to better match someone's search and their understanding of your page. They'll either pull text from another location on your page that matches terms or related terms of a user's search, rewrite title tags from time to time, or display what you write.  See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624.  Cheers!

There was a nice discussion here on tags: http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-tag-pages-noindex that still applies. In general they tend to eliminate duplicate content issues when noindexed.

Good work Adam! You pretty much have to go with the contact method at first if at all possible. As more sites transition away from this sort of thing though you'll likely run into more success as you do. It's abundantly easy for Google to spot sites like goarticles and ezine and spank them if they choose. Who knows, that could be something that comes up in the EU...

Generally forum links that are from useful and accurate comments don't bother me as they're semantically relevant to the conversation and pretty well established in the global scope of the web. I wouldn't expect them to bring too much value though as well, especially the sig ones. Still, if you're ranking highly within the forum, and your comments are adding to the conversation, the sig link would be good just from a users perspective. I'd leave it for that alone.