Jane_Doe - 5:20 pm on Jul 22, 2002 (gmt 0)

I'm working at a company that had their site PR0'd from their former SEO company's spam techniques. Their URL was the company name with hundreds of inbound links pointing to it, so this was not a good situation for them to be in. So based on their experience, I have thought about what they could have done to have hired a more reputable company the first time around.

I think it may be good idea to give a potential SEO firm a technical interview. You'd have to talk to the people doing the actual SEO work (which may not be the owners or marketing reps), but this is probably a good idea anyway.

I'd print out Brett's Google knowledgebase questions, the library posts from this site and the webmaster tips from Google. Then I'd ask some of the basic questions from these lists to the SEO candidates.

The kinds of questions I'd ask would be: What is Pagerank? What is a PR0 penalty? How can you find out what sites are linking to your sites? What techniques does Google consider spam? How often does Google update their index? What is a link farm? What are the names of some of the robots for the major search engines? What is a referer URL?

It would be good to do this in person, if possible, so they can't look up the answers while talking to you on the phone. If candidate firms are really competent at SEO work, I think they would know the answers to these types of questions quite readily. If more than one firm answers these questions okay, then interview them both again and ask harder questions.

I agree that asking for references and a portfolio of work would also be important.