www.roanoketechnology.com

I get solicited all the time by people that want to sell me SEM services. I thoroughly enjoy playing dumb and hearing their pitch. Some are good, in fact some are good enough that I would hire them to work for me. Others, well, they are the snake oil salesmen of 21st century.

One in particular is Roanoke Technology Corp (AKA as TOP 10 Promotions). They have an incredibly slick sales presentation. And their key sales people are slick.

Their gig works like this.

They optimize your pages for you. Nothing to spammy, I am sure. Just text and H1 tags. They also create pages for the bots (doorway pages anyone). And then the real kicker is they place your link on their previous 50 clients websites. Yikes! That is crazy b.a.n.a.n.a.s.

During the pitch I nod along approvingly. And then I lay the question I like to ask them every time they call me. And that is “I heard about this thing called PR. What is that?” According to them, it’s not very important and has nothing to do with ranking. That kind of sounds like Google. But the thing is do you really want a SEM firm that has no PR doing your SEO/SEM work?

Anyway, I pushed him a little more on the PR thing. And he so badly wanted to gloss over it. Kept assuring me it meant nothing. BTW last year when I got the first pitch they used a website called something like top 10 promotions.com that too had no PR.

Here’s the funny bit. I’ve got a website that is black listed in Google. About 3 years ago I messed up and ran a fowl of Google. Google rewarded me by permanently delisting that site of mine. So guess what site I wanted Roanoke Technology Corp to work on. Yep, that site with a nice big fat goose egg for PR. I’ve owned the domain for nearly 4 years now. Um, I wonder how important PR will be to them then.

There are only three reasons I can think of for not having PR showing.

The site is brand spanking new

The site is black listed (it use to be grey barred)

No links what-so-ever. But over time that is hard to avoid.

www.roanoketechnology.com is not brand spanking new.

Be careful who you choose for you SEM/SEO work. If they don’t appear transparent then move on.