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Yeah I've never heard of this. The other thing they might be doing is just optimizing the accounts they manage to spend less money after they take over the management of them. Optimizing bids, using negatives, and going after only highly profitable keywords could help them reduce costs and then they just keep the savings over the 5% they are guaranteeing you? If they are still leaving the account and billing in your control, you'd be able to verify this. Did they say how the billing is handled? Either way, this sounds highly suspicious.

I have built a website for a pharmaceutical company but the problem is that my client was a trade supplier, not a retail seller - he was not interested in SEO at all for the site. There are some important points you raise though. Obviously it would be easier to rank an exact match domain name but the reverse side of the coin is the building trust using the company name and reputation... This is vital for the market they are in if they are looking to increase revenue by using an eCommerce website - there are so many spammy sites in this market. The domain age on the old site your client has should be important and help it rank quicker. There is no reason why (over time) you cannot rank well with a website without its main keyword in the domain name, it will just take more effort and a better/stronger strategy. It might be worth looking at brainstorming ideas at this point... Why not keep the old domain with the company name in and use it for the main eCommerce website but then look at creating a niche domain for the client with the keyword in the URL? One thing I would say is to be very careful with SEO in this market. Due to so many rogues in the industry for medicine there is so much spam out there. Getting good quality relevant links might be hard, just be careful where you get your links from. EDIT: Perhaps the last sentence did not raise the point I was looking to make. The point I was trying to raise is that this industry generally uses very black hat techniques when optimising and are looking to make quick £££ until their site gets sandboxed. Just make sure you are careful with the techniques.

Tough decision but if the price of the website is affordable I would purchase it. You have to remember it is important to analyze the site and do research but your other competitors may pick up underneath you too. If it is in your budget it maybe best to buy it and hold onto it.

Just my opinion here, since you have some great answers already: I might be completely alone on this, but I definitely would encourage testing. Mock up some SERPs and do some user testing with Mechanical Turk to judge if it looks spammy, enticing etc.. Here's an example from Australia - Look for Travel Insurance Direct (should be #1) http://dis.tl/vph36j I think it might be the only way we can add our personal touch in SERPs and I love creativity. Good luck!

Hi Mike, The 301s should take care of the link juice. A rel canonical tag wouldn't do any harm if it eases your mind though. Is there a reason you are serving the whole thing https? If not, as Jane, James and I all agree on - it is probably best to only use https where necessary.

Totally agree Roger, that setting is only good for those humongous campaigns with tons of data points. To circumvent the issue, for smaller campaigns I sometimes: Start/run campaign entirely on basic/default settings. Even ad rotation. Days. Bids. Everyything. No smart anything. Everything bare bones basic, as if I were dealing with the Adwords interface from pre 2005. Then once enough data has collected I automate things one by one. Nothing beats the pure raw data in the beginning to give a better picture.