My company recently hired an SEO to help to improve our search rankings. Can someone tell me if the following method is shady?

1. They created a sitemap which links to dense, keyword text pages.

2. When I look at the code, the images from our site are hosted by them. i.e. http://theirwebsiteaddress.com/client_images/ourimage

3. All of the sitemap links they created do this

Any info would be appreciated
Thanks
K

1. Define "dense, keyword text" pages (ideally, with a link to the sitemap so we can judge for ourselves.) Are these pages that are a normal part of your site? Were they added on to the site? Do they have any weird external links (not counting the image issue)?

2. I'd say that's strange at best; why they would host the images themselves is beyond me, unless they were planning to pick up cheap traffic from people who wanted to look beyond the image at the site itself. If that's the case, I'd say it's more of a silly traffic generating stunt on their part than any SEO attempt.

If you've given them access to your server there is no reason for them to host images on their server. In fact if that is their policy with all SEO clients you have to wonder why they would spend their own bandwidth hosting other peoples images... I'm not saying they are unethical...just strange.

Another issue is: you are leaving yourself exposed. Break the deal and all your images may disappear.

Re: keyword dense pages...

If you decide to focus on specific keyword phrases - your real site pages should be filled with rich, "enjoyable to read" text. More text = more secondary key phrases you will pick up in the searches. Building "special" pages filled with text may or may not be good for your site. If the pages are part of your content development plan (example: you planned to add more content to your site anyway), this could be be a good thing. If the pages are simply being filled with words that are not pleasant to the reader, how is that going to bring you more quality traffic. The visitor lands and takes off again because the page isn't designed to hold them.

The images on their server isn't something Google will care about one way or the other ... but you definitely should. As mentioned, it can be a bit of a ransom policy, with your images disappearing or being replaced with something offensive. Or reused in ways you might not be comfortable with.

Thanks all for the comments.

The "dense, keyword text pages" are kind of random excerpts from the rest of our site strung together in slightly nonsensical ways. They were added to the site for "optimization" and don't have any other external links.

They are a visual replica of our standard site format, but where we normally have html text links in our site menu, this company has changed them into graphical site menu links and then hosted this graphic menu - which I find to be really odd.

They are spamming with the oldest form of stupidity.

doorway pages.

Get rid of them before any harm is done.

Follow Chris's advice, and as soon as you're finished with that, call your bank and cancel the pending check(s). Forget the images for now, the junk pages will bring the wrath of Google down on your site.