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Try using the following in the head section of the page: This indicates, which image should represent the page. It works with some - it doesn't with the other - you already use: which is usually picked by Facebook and some other sites. Give it a try and see if it works for you - I'm using both on my sites and it seem to be doing a good job.

Thanks Jeff I've been resisting the Yoast solution for the same point you raised, but it does seem to be the best solution.  Will download it into a test blog and try it out. Thanks for you help Catherine

I think being a genuine member of a forum can be helpful, though it can also be time consuming to become a real member of the community and participate even when you're not getting an immediate link. One helpful part of becoming a member of the community that is related to your client/site is that you get a feel for the questions that people ask, current problems in the field, and can get a lot of ideas for content and products that are needed in that field.

Hey Techboy - Assuming your site validates fine using the Rich Snippets tool,  as you said, unfortunately I don't think there is much you can do. I heard Stefan Weitz from Bing talk about it, and he said that it's a slow rollout because they want to get it right, and they are also wanting to see how people use it. Also, the search engines are giving priority to brands and well-known people (especially with rel=author markup), so the little guys are having a harder and harder time getting the semantic markup to show in the SERPs. He even went so far as to say that we should mark up our sites now, so that when Schema is rolled out more we'll be ahead of the curve (and he insinuated that it will affect rankings positively as well). Sorry I can't provide an actionable answer, but right now with the semantic markup it can be a bit of a waiting game.

Wow! Thanks for all the replies! Funny you should mention that Stephan, thats the exact same solution I put to our providers. Their working on a slightly different solution at the moment, but thats my fallback option. My main issue is that there would be so many duplicate URLs (tens of thousands!), which the Search Engines would undoubtedly frown upon. I'll keep you all updated on my progress! Thanks again

I don't think it would be too bad. A cleaner name would be better but having the new images show is important too. More important in my opinion.

I agree, if you can see the content in the code and it is available to the customer... I think you will be okay. I think hidden content means content someone on the outside cannot see or access.

Hi! This is actually a known issue with OSE. With the new deeper crawl that it is doing, it's finding a lot of downloadable program files and is getting confused and saying those binary files are actually links. SEOmoz is well aware of this and working on fixing the way the crawler works. It is nothing your competitors are doing, but a problem on the moz end of things. Carin has a detailed explanation in this thread at http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-are-our-competitors-getting-these-inbound-linking-domains.

If you are hoping to pass on link juice to the listed properties, you have a problem. If you are not listing them for SEO benefits then don't worry about it. Google will crawl the first 100 or so links, and stop. This is not detrimental to your site, you just arnt passing on any link juice. GREG

Hi Keri, Thanks for getting back on this. I was able to make my case, but without the scientific evidence I was looking for. It turned out that the manual referral system used by the hiring managers of the company has major flaws and is not properly used by most of the managers. That resulted in faulty referral reports to the HQ. In short they had a bigger problem than the referral question :).

Hi! You're seeing something that Google rolled out last month where they put in lists like that in the SERPs. They wrote a post about it at http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html.

Sorry for the late reply. It doesn't look like too many people here use that technique. If you want a deeper evaluation of if that would be helpful in your situation, you can consider making this a private question and asking SEOmoz staff for an opinion.

Could they be archived links from years ago? I have the same problem. Products we used to sell but either no longer sell or are out of stock (they are made inactive in the CMS and do not appear on site) show up in some google searches and in the crawl test. Any ideas? Cheers Will

The easiest way would be to add a disallow line to your robots.txt file. From Google: To block access to all URLs that include a question mark (?) (more specifically, any URL that begins with your domain name, followed by any string, followed by a question mark, followed by any string):``` User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*? More info: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449

This topic affects everyone and Rand offered a specific reply to address these concerns. In short, they are working on the issue but there is only an opportunity to make adjustments once per month. Then the crawler is set to do it's job and the results wont be seen for another month. The crawler has to go out and pull data from literally billions of web pages. The data then needs to be processed which takes 1-2 weeks. The team is also trying to improve the quality of the tool as well. My recommendation is to use OSE as a guide, not a solid list of all links. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/november-2011-linkscape-update

Cheers Ryan.

You are welcome to do both, but I would only do such if you felt the link would actually be used by visitors or otherwise added value to your site. The SEO value of footer links is quite small. It is my belief Google understands footer links, understands sitewide links, and assigns a value accordingly.