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Wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this. One of my clients was asking me what they thought of a certain website design company. They wanted to use this company because their designs were very beautiful but wanted to be sure that contracting them would be the right decision.

After I made my formal review and recommendation I thought this might be a great topic of discussion for the amazing SEOMOZ community.

So, what factors do you look at when determining which design firms are worth their weight?

Thanks CleverPhD. Exactly what I was thinking, just wanted to have someone else confirm. Appreciate it!

I have a client that is wanting me to issue a 404 on her links that are no longer valid to a custom 404, pause for 10 seconds, then rediirect to the root page (or whatever other redirect logic she wants)...to me it seems trying to game googlebot this way is a "bad idea"

Can anyone confirm/deny or offer up a better suggestion?

Don't go grey. Don't rat either because it won't do any good unless many others do the same. Google seems to ignore the one-off requests.

Maybe a bit off topic, but I think the bigger problem here is that Search Engines don't reward White Hat practitioners as quickly as they do the Black & Grey Hatters. The latter sees immediate results by manipulating the system and the penalties are not assessed until week, months or even years afterwards.

Search Engines have made such great strides in many areas but are still lacking in the penalty department.

With search becoming more social, I don't see how SEO and reputation can't do the same. Search Engines should use cues to help trust websites by having developers, designers and SEO's alike "sign" their work. They can attach these sites to their profiles or add a personalized meta tag signature. Having these tags could help Search Engines fight spammy techniques and even offer up suggestions to improve the sites on a more personalized level, without calling anyone out. They can penalize while educating.

I'v been seeing a lot of websites use a technique to present content to website visitors when the scroll down the page called "Lazy Loading". Does this hinder SEO and indexing since the content is not actually on the page until the user acts/requests it?