SEO company, 2 domains and one is banned

Would you use this company? I have been doing some searching and found a local SEO company that I am thinking of speaking with. They have 2 domains, one a .com and one a .ca and the .com site is banned. Could the banned site be a tester?

What I mean by banned is that when you go to one of the big three SE's home pages and do a search for www .theirdomain .com you get nothing back on any of the search engines and there is no PR either for G.

Now, they could be testing. The domain that is banned has been registered since the late 90's. The .ca has been registered since the early 2000. Their .ca has a PR5.

Using the site: G search they have 114 pages indexed and there are 51 backlinks. They have written some articles that have ben published.

They charge around $2500 Canadian for just under 25 hours of work.

What do you think? Can someone recommend someone local to BC at around the same dollar value I could contact.

 

Thanks Shawn,

One problem, they only have client testimonials and then a list of thinks like this:

-Real Estate Industry
-Non-Profit Organizations

etc...

 

Before you use an SEO company talk to them first. You will have lots of questions but there are two that will quickly separate the professionals from the rest:

Ask for 3+ references and current clients and follow them all up.

Ask to see a sample contract.

- Michael

 

I don't think any top SEO company will give that list. SEO tricks can be easily copied.

 

I don't think any reputable SEO company would hesitate to give that list...

They may not be "banned", NC -- they may have made a decision as a Canadian SEO company to list high in the regional SERPs and "disabled" the .com site, either because it is an empty/parked domain that they own to prevent someone else owning it, or because it is duplicate content and they want the .ca site to show up in searches.

What happens when you go to www. theirdomain .com? Is there a site there at all? Are you redirected to the .ca site? Do you see a duplicate site?

Check www. theirdomain .com /robots.txt -- is there such a file and if so does it contain lines like this?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

 

Minstrel,

The site is live. It has no PR and does not show when you type their domain in any of the big three.

The content between the three looks like this:

1. Whole HTML Code:
Matched content: 10.86%
2. Whole text:
Matched content: 16.25%
3. HTML Code within body tag:
Matched content: 10.16%
4. Text within body tag:
Matched content: 16.57%

Pretty high, but not worth banning I wouldn't think.

 

Then I suggest that they may be aiming for what I mentioned above -- maximize the .ca ranking but protect the .com in case someone types in the address manually and arrives there.

Did you check for the robots.txt file?

 

Yea, robots.txt is allowing all and their meta info is <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

 

Very curious, NC... I understand why you don't want to (and probably shouldn't) post the URL but there has to be something more about the .com site. You said the .com site was registered in the late 90s -- any chance they bought it recently? Check on http://www.whois.sc/ (free registration required but they don't spam you or anything -- they just hope you'll find the basic service helpful enough that you'll want to sign up for the paid enhanced service) -- look to see if that domain changed hands recently -- if so, maybe the previous owner did something bad. Other possibilities: check out the host's IP and how many other sites are inhabiting it...

 

NC - PM me the URL and I'll have a look... I'd like to see the site if you don't mind

Cheers