Robert,

I see our interns as our top people down the road.  We use our internship as a way to support people as they save for or go to college. We want top notch people working with us who are engaged in building the business. It is hard to get most people real engaged unless you are compensating them in some way.

I think it is appropriate to pay them at or near minimum wage to start as the company needs to invest in them to get them up to speed. As they start to contribute more and learn more we structure their compensation so that they can make more.  In my opinion one of the best lessons you can teach someone is that,"you eat what you hunt and kill" in the work place.  I think a performance based compensation and a clear path of advancement encourages growth.

Anyway that's my two cents.

Ron

Chris,

We ran into this with another firm in the Seattle area.  They were using all the names their competitors in their meta descriptions and they did go so far as to include specific pages dedicated to each competitor.  In the end several of the companies went after them for copyright infringement as they violated their copyrights to create these pages. This is a more aggressive path but it is one you could consider.

Ron

Nathan,

I would always recommend this.  This techniques gives you a higher quality score on pay per click while indexing on search.  As you build out your content and links your performance will get better and better.  This is also a good format for running software like Optimizely for conversion optimization.