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Is there a way to find out if a company is a legitimate SEO company? They also did the web design for our site and did a fantastic job on that end of things. It's the SEO that's questionable.

Thanks Peter,

I will see if we can get the robot.txt file and see if that has anything to do with what happened.

As far as the directories go, so far none of the ones I've checked have any content. They are just straight directories with links such as this one http://www.rightwingeye.com/  In my opinion linking to directories like that are not good, but I could be wrong.   I will check them with Open Site Explorer. If I discover bad ones do I need to remove our website from them? Or doesn't it matter?

Hello!  The company that I work for recently hired a company to do their SEO.  After they took over we fell out of the search engines for our keywords for 6 months! (I had previously done the SEO using Moz, but had to step down due to my husband getting cancer. He's all better and I'm back. )

We contacted the SEO company recently to find out why the only way we could be found in the search engines was if we searched on our name. The reason they gave was Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird. I personally don't believe that would cause our site to disappear for 6 months then miraculously reappear for our keywords a few days after us complaining.

One of my main concerns is they have submitted us to 140 directories and 20 social bookmarking sites. How do I tell if these are good or bad sites? A few of them I've clicked are suspended and one Google warns about malicious content and to leave immediately -  so those are obvious.

Thanks for your help!

Kelley Insana