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That was my initial plan but our programmer didn't like the 'external' call being made.  So we went with just '/' keeping it all on site.  Man I love the Q & A here.  Thanks for the help!

Helped a lot, thanks for taking the time!

That's what had our programmer displeased.  Appreciate the assistance!

When doing internal linking back to your home/index page is it best to set the code as linked to "www.thedomain.com" or "www.thedomain.com/" or just "/" - I'm attempting some canonicalization and our programmer is concerned about linking to just the URL as he's saying it's going to be viewed as an external source.  We have www redirects in place that come back to just www.thedomain.com and a redirect to send the www.thedomain.com/index.php back to just www.thedomain.com .  Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

You need to contact your SEO company and ask them what is going on.  It's very possible that they wrote you original content that someone else has stolen for their own.  If that is the case then the SEO company hasn't done anything  wrong.  Stealing content is a huge no-no.  Make sure you know for sure before dropping a nuke on them.

I took a peek at a couple of your blog posts and didn't see anything that was linking back to the services that those posts may be ranking for.  Would be a good idea that when you are making a post that relates to one of your services to link back to that service page.