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Here's Matt Cutts speaking directly to this question: http://www.get.uk.com/page.php?article=1724&name=Better+Spelling+Equals+Better+Search+Results+%5BGOOGLE%5D

1. Expandable divs. You can feature each image as the visible portion of an expandable div. It's fairly easy to code.

Check out @ipullrank Michael King's  presentation which touches on the subject: http://www.slideshare.net/ipullrank/ux-seo-lets-be-friends-by-michael-king

This is entirely white-hat btw: it's creating a cleaner user experience, while allowing visitor to read more if they want, without being directed to a new page.

2. Put text portion, such as a feed with excerpts from a blog, "below the fold."

That said, be sure to name your image files with relevant keywords as well as appropriate alt-text and description. And don't forget the OGP and schema markup too.

Dana,

I'm looking forward to seeing that happen. Hope you're composing a blog piece on that topic now: when it's announced that publisher's brand images will appear in SERPS, you'll be able to publish that news and get the lion's share of news cycle traffic.

No.

You'll often see the same domain appear in multiple positions, even on page one, for the same KWs.

Hi Margaret,

Have you tested rankings with different geography settings, and depersonalized?

What kind of links do you have pointing at these pages?

Does the  homepage appear in SERPs with sitelinks (category pages, for example) when it appears in brand-name search?

I don't know your situation, so this is a best guess: I'd work on getting some more authority and relevance through some new (relevant & authoritative) links, aim them at your most valuable pages, and give it some time. Depending on the KW difficulty, it might take a few links, it might take many. Impossible to be certain without knowing the full story competitor landscape and backlink profiles.

Forgive this question: is the autogenerated canonical URL to the root domain or to the page-deep URL? I only ask because I've seen autogenerator tools set the incorrect canonical and checking to see if it's possible that happened on some of your pages.

"Sometimes it shows up in both," to me, makes me think you've (probably) nothing to worry about. You're getting crawled as a Blog, which helps you in blog specific searches like Icerocket or Google Blog Search, etc., and you're also appearing as a website.  It certainly doesn't seem like it will hurt your rankings.

To be more specific, if you have good body text, Google/Bing can pull that into the SERPs if there is no meta description. That shortens your efforts. What I'm saying is, A/B test a page with Fetch or some other headless browser tool to see what the SERP is like without Meta description. I'm sure you've seen cruddy SERP results with Alt-text or code or unpronouncable characters: that's a coding issue. In many cases the result will be the H1 text, or the first sentence of the body.

As for what Luke said, yes, if bots aren't pulling good text into that space, a dynamic programmatically generated meta can work. It depends on goals. The downsides are that it can lose you a click if the searcher doesn't like what they see, as in, if the CTA or hook is ineffective. With body text they might give you the benefit of the doubt.

Wasn't able to visit the site, got this warning, attached.
Kinda poignant that this warning from the Fiji site gave me a warning referencing the Pacific site, which is exactly the kind of thing we're talking about. 
Wonder if the very plugin your client is using is causing this issue too.

kJlVa

I think if the site in question is not an established news site (appearing in Google News results) then it won't do a thing...  Of course, a blogger that scoops other "real journalists" and is heavily cited ought to at least give it  a try!  If the blog is later given News (Publisher) authority, that standout article could be valuable.

_To me, the best-case scenario would be to use these blogs to pump out fresh, authoritative content for each satellite site blog -- a more intensive undertaking, to be sure, but a best practice -- and include an RSS feed. _

Agreed. Also, there's no reason he can't write a post for one audience that references a post he made on another domain. It's hard to get a good feel for the whole situation without viewing the sites and blogs themselves.

Yup, if you've got the same product content with multiple URLs, that's the exact definition of duplicate content.

Simple solution: set rel="canonical" on all of these to aim towards the page/URL you're going to target for ranking in Search. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

**Widget Program | Widget Software | Widget Direct does look like stuffing. Can you add some context to help with that? **

Widget Direct:  Find Widget Programs and Widget Software here.

******Even that looks a little amiss. Maybe "**Widget Direct: Programs and Software for Widgets!" ********

Have you suggested he use an iframe to host the content from one site into the satellites?
Or maybe simply a feed to show the fresh content to visitors? 
Does he convert on those satellite sites or are they micros to drive to the main?

The thing is, it is definitely going to be duplicate content, and since the host is presumably the same... well... Not good.

I would ask: "why?" He is expecting to get links to this content on this site one day, the same content on this site the next? If it's a good post, what would happen if someone shares it socially from one domain, and those exposed to it see it elsewhere?

I think noindexing is a good half measure, but if the point of the content is to be consumed, enjoyed, attract social shares and links, build traffic and then convert, then there's really little if any gain to be had in even doing that. A noindexed blog post getting links? A noindexed blog category getting social buzz?

Force your client to understand the end goal. If he just wants something for them to read, add a feed. Then the social shares and links will do some good to at least the most important domain.

Whew, that is a tough one. IMHO, you are better off with a useful Meta description--one that is accurate to what the SITE is about--than none, IF there's a risk that bots will pull something other than useful text (like the social button or image alt text). Just think how the SERPs would look if only Title is visible, or a mess.

But, better with none, and let the bots pull in their own, than an inaccurate one (what you have now).

Have you talked to a dev about a dynamic and programmatic way to make unique meta descriptions for these 6500 pages? What kind of result do you get if you delete the meta description? Can you use a testing tool to fetch the site without meta description, just to see what searchers will see? If it's not bad and is more useful than a sitewide duplicate, just blank the majority out,

But, is that doing you any harm?

When the site was first set up, did you submit the site to blog directories? Is there a blog feed in Feedburner or anything?

You can disable the click tracking with this code:

var addthis_config = {
   data_track_clickback: false
}

http://www.addthis.com/help/clickbacks

But I don't think the appended tag will do you any harm as is. It's just a tracking code for you to be able to track results in the AddThis dashboard.

I think most of the major media markets would have distribution in both, so there's a good possibility that the UK PRs would indeed "bleed."

Are the ccTLDs in countries of origin not in English? In that case I would absolutely spend the extra money to get each PR translated, and send to news outlets in the target language with the featured ccTLD.

But to save money, if they're monophone, I would bundle as many same-language TLDs into one press release. Also, imagine you're a news editor and you see this:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *** EXAMPLE.SE LAUNCHES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *** EXAMPLE.DE LAUNCHES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *** EXAMPLE.CZ LAUNCHES
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE *** EXAMPLE.CM LAUNCHES

Nothing will get you into the roundfile faster than such a barrage. Less is more. If there are multiple language audiences/recipients, that's different.

I think your instincts are right: there's not a lot of risk, but not a lot of benefit either.

The algorithm doesn't "penalize" for sitewide footer links, it's just not as much of a ranking factor as it used to be. I guess the question is, knowing how popular the origin site is, if the links were set to nofollow, would you still do it? (branding, referral traffic)
If the answer is yes go for it. If it creates a relationship with that site's webmaster, it's a nobrainer.