If your dropdown is powered by...

• CSS: Yes, they can see it.

• Javascrip:. Most likely yes.

• Flash: Almost definitely not.

Maybe part of the literature describing your program can include the point that to be really effective the franchisee's will have to write their own content. It all depends on your business model, whether you want to make them aware that they have 100-5,000 competitors from your company alone.

You may want to re-think your strategy of franchising the product and the content. If the content is the same the only way to eliminate the duplicate content problem is to point to one of them as the canonical version, and that would very much impact the performance of the other versions of the other sites.

If a human curator isn't possible (and it doesn't sound feasible for your site) then this is the next best thing. If it makes you nervous you could make the alt tag Photo of %title, but I don't think that is necessary. For example, Amazon uses the title as alt tag too.

Google has been looking at CSS for a while now, but I think its only to stop black hat tricks like z-indexing away filler text or using H1 tags where they're not actually headlines. An overflow:scroll is just a way of visually organizing your content, so I can't see any good reason that Google would penalize this. Of course, I don't have data to back this up so take it for what its worth.

What they could conceivably do is subtract some weight from the text inside the element with the overflow property. If there are two paragraphs on a page, one with overflow, one without, it could argued that the paragraph without the overflow scroll bars can be seen as slightly more important, since its presented in full.

Woah, quicker on the draw! I yield to you, sir

Have you already tried www.xml-sitemaps.com ? It will crawl and generate a sitemap in whatever format you want.

However, in terms of reporting problems I've found the SEOmoz crawler and related tools to be invaluable.

You can save your sitemap in xml format from the above site, and use that to submit to search engines.

There is a nominal value in submitting your press release to places like prweb.com. I've successfully used their site to get a few backlinks that helped out, albeit only a small amount.

Another tactic is to use HARO to get your organizations message published.

The true value of a press release is in its news-worthiness. If your PR is just thinly veiled advertising, its not going to be worth much. If your PR is exciting and new, it can go viral and a press release service can help with the first steps to getting it there.