IBL building company - advice needed!

[pagetta]

We sell business software, and up until november, we were consistently in the top 3 pages for the search term 'sap business one' (in the uk), but we have since slipped to page 13 and cannot seem to crawl back up at all, we are wavering between the top of p13 and the bottom of p12. A colleague recently met with an old friend who mentioned that he ran a company doing SEO, and could get us on page 1 of google, and their tactiv was building inbound links. Last weekend, he showed us how, using some other search terms, like CRM software, and within 3 days my colleague showed me that we were on page one, however the result didn't list our own URL, it was a URL of one of this companie's sites redirecting, although I realise he did this just to show how quickly he could get results - if we actually used him it would be our own URL appearing on page 1 for whatever search terms we choose, and we only pay if we're on page1. Our adwords for this company are currently costing us about £250 per month, and this service is £150 a month, so you can see how it looks attractive to us!

Basically, this sounds a little bit suspect to me - how can someone turn a ranking around like that in 3 days without it being a bit risky? Has anyone got any thoughts on this? we are meeting with him today, does anyone know what questions we should ask about his techniques in order to check he's not using any dodgy techniques. Please bear in mind I am relatively new hear, and the man we are meeting with is a good freind of my colleague, who has worked here for 7 years, so as always there are office politics involved and I don't want to offend, but it just seems too good to be true.

I have also just read some articles and comments on a different forum about how google is not doing a very good job of filtering out spammy irrelevant sites, even though ours is not irrelevant to the searchterms we intent to use, is this company taking advantage of googles algorhythms nature - doesn't this mean on another major update all our low PR IBLS could see us fall right back down?

I have only been introduced to SEO 3 months ago, and it is only a small portion of my job so I am picking it up quite slowly and trying constantly not to make any assumptions as I know it is a constantly changing environment that I am still quite new to!

Any advice would be much appreciated on this subject!

thank you!

[Waddle]

I think you have the right idea as far as going for natural search engine placement. Developing appropriate reciprocal links is also a good idea. The redirect this person showed you is really meaningless, and based on soley on this, I would be suspect. It is fine to pay for link development, if you don't have the time to do it yourself, but realize it will take time for this to change your Search Engine Placement. So you will not be able to stop the Adwords unless you are also willing to give up the leads it is providing. You will likely have to pay for both Adsense and the Link Development services simultaneously. Anyway, I would just ask around, get some references, and make sure you can see the results from work they have done with others. It also makes a great deal of difference depending on what keywords you are going after, and how competitive they are.

[jlknauff]

Not to mention that when things go sour and he sells that spot to someone else your traffic is chopped off at the knees and you have to start all over.