Thought I'd give my .02 Ca., and we all know what that's worth!;)
<snip>
1) The PageRank in my Google toolbar appeared grey. I have read that this means either they have been banned or not
ranked yet (which they surely must be if they appear at number 4?).
</snip>
I believe a white bar is usually associated with no/or few links
that "count", a greybar usually means a penalty. AFAIK, Google
may just penalize a page and banning usually means the whole
site is removed from the index. They may have been penalized for
anything from accessive querying of Google to using a link
building program or simply are linked to a "bad neighborhood".
Who knows if Google is even aware of the inappropriate use
of the the <noscript> Tag. That has IMO, been on the rise perhaps
there isn't a filter for it and they are relying on human reports on
which to build a filter.;)
<snip>
2) They have 0 backward links. Zero. Nadda. Nothing.
</snip>
Grey bar doesn't necessarily mean banned but does indicate
a heavy penalty which may account for no links being found. Did
you check the cache to be sure what you were seeing is what was
actually indexed? Might as well compare apples to apples.;)
<snip>
3) The first few lines of the HTML are keywords stuffed into comment tags (<!-- overseas removals company, move
office furniture, etc -->)
</snip>
Google and quite possibly all engines with the possible exception of
Inktomi AFAIK don't index comments. Just use of a trick as old as
the hills and then some. If it's spam, it isn't very sophisticated.;)
<snip>
4) There is a <noscript> section at the bottom of the page that repeats all of the content, but adds in a few more <h3> tags and links that don't exist anywhere in the real,
visible content of the site.
</snip>
Definitely not the intended use of any of the the Tags and IMO,
degrades the usability of the site for visually impaired and text
browsers. In other words poor implementation of the tags not
to mention it is likely not appropriate or a best practices
implementation. Risky but hard to detect without human
inspection.
Seems like a lot of wasted time and effort, especially if
reported!
Hope this explains a few of things you asked about.
