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Yes, particularly McAfee and Verisign. This is my belief and not necessarily commonly accepted (yet) amongst the SEO community. I base this belief on a few things: Panda. The questions asked of Panda reviewers were of the type "Would you trust this site with your credit card information". There are studies which clearly demonstrate improved CTR based on the addition of symbols, which tells me these symbols have a positive influence on these decisions. Additionally, the inclusion of these badges are an item which Google can easily track. It is also easy for Google to separate out authentic badges from the many sites who fake it (i.e. show the trust badge image but do not offer the functionality). Security. I sincerely believe sites with McAfee and VeriSign are more secure. I have a client who actually accepted direct credit card payments without SSL on his site. Doing such is a major violation of credit card acceptance, but somehow he managed to do it (prior to hiring me) and he got nailed. Someone hit his site with malware which stole credit card information. He fixed the problem but of course the malware issue impacts rankings. If I can ever make the time I intend to write an article on this topic as I have done quite a bit of research. In my opinion VeriSign and McAfee's value is significantly higher then other SSL certificates due to their recognition amongst users. Trustwave, GoDaddy and other providers may offer a similar service, but it is very clear to me those badges do not offer the same recognition as do Verisign and McAfee. I just worked with a client who, on my recommendation, turned down a free eCommodo SSL and purchased a Verisign badge for $266. The bottom line is if that Verisign badge yields one extra customer per year, it pays for itself. This particular client sells a $60 product which is purchased monthly and has a high profit margin. Also McAfee and Verisign (Norton) both have an extension with millions of users each. Users of their AV software will have sites with their trust badges highlighted with their "Seal in Search" feature. Clearly this function is designed to influence CTR and each company provides numbers to show support that conclusion. As far as ranking, I can't say whether Google uses this information as a ranking factor but I know they could and perhaps even should. If I was Google, I would address users with those browser extensions installed by boosting the rankings for sites with the specific seals. In April of next year the Verisign Seal will change it's name to Norton. If Norton does not do any advertising, this may cause a significant drop in that seal's recognition and value. It's a big unknown at this point.

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.

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.

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.