is this blackhat

[GregC]

Ive been contacted(pestered) by a company called itscoldoutside saying they want to do something to my site to help seo. they gave me www-activeaqua-com as the example of someone else they had done it for and said they had seen great success.

go to the website above and scroll down to bottom of page. then on left hand side click on resources. a load of keyword rich text appears.

i said no automatically because it seems black hat to me and is similiar to the old trick of having white text on a white background.


it does actually seem like a good idea, but black hat and deceptive nevertheless.

I have no intention of doing it but i'd like to hear the opinion of the seasoned seo experts here! what do you think?

[dotwhack]

Hi!

At the company I used to work for we employed an SEO company (for mega-bucks) to revolutionise our website - what we got was the page title replaced by 5 keywords supplied by us and a 'read more' link which expanded to be a page that featured some paragraphs of text about our 5 keywords - again supplied by us.

Seems a bit of a con but actually increased page ranking.

Not sure whether it's black hat or ok - Google seems to take notice so it mustn't be completely unethical.

I'm actually about to implement it on the site I currently work on as it seemed to work last time - so I'd be interested if you find out any more about it.

[fisicx]

Matt Cutts on Keyword stuffing.

It is black hat - the page is clearly designed not to be seem by human but be visible to the indexing robot.

Do not pay these people anything - if they were any good they would have fixed the more obvious errors on the site.

[andyf]

@Greg
Have you asked them (SEO company)for what keywords their site is ranking top ?
lol... the site they have worked SEO for " www-activeaqua-com" is totally bullshi*, haven't you notice that they are overoptimizing/stuffing keywords within content.
It seems that the site is made only made for bots ( trying to top for thir keywords in SERP's )
i will suggest you not to go with them, IMHO there is no need to hire some SEO professional, you can optimize your site if you have spare time and would like to read and understand few basic SEO steps.
Remember SEO is not a night magic, you will have to keep patience for getting results.
You can have a look at oru blog for getting more details on SEO and webhosting related articles

[pickaweb.co.uk]

I agree with that.
Takes time. You do not get a good position overnight.
I would also recommend doing the SEO yourself rather than using them.

[tamecrow]

It's not often I'll say this about a competitor, but do not use this company. Seriously. We've had clients come to use who have used Itscoldoutside and have had no end of problems, including being banned from search engines. They simply set up doorway pages and cloak results - tactics which are very easily spotted these days.

Do a Google search for their company name and read up on some forum threads. It's truly shocking stuff.

[Elquicos]

Google is getting cleverer at spotting spam, even if a spammy technique works in the short term it'll probably get you in trouble in the future. Obviously it's necessary to be a bit agressive if you're in a competitive industry but it's important to keep things as ethical as possible. Sometimes it's a bit frustrating as you see other competitors doing dodgy stuff and going away with it, but in the long term if you keep a tidy link structure and spiderable content, and you base your SEO strategy on building your domain authority through relevant links, you can get good results in the long term