It's Cold Outside

Hi guys,

Has anyone heard of, or used a company called It's Cold Outside (www.itscoldoutside.com)? They've contacted me and guaranteed first page listings in 25 leading search engines including MSN, Google, Lycos, HotBot, Altavista, Yahoo.

They use what they call an i-site, this is a page "filled with content relevant to your website" (according to their saleswoman) and sounds suspiciously like a doorway page to me.

They charge a setup fee of £499(!) per site and a further £30 per month to keep the site in that position. I asked her about the similarity between her "i-site" and the historically spammish doorway pages but she told me that their system was "much more complicated than that". It seems that they don't want to reveal too much about the "i-site" but i suspect they're nothing more than a page full of <H1> keywords the same colour as the background!

Oh, she also told me that the "i-site" may have slight effects on my sites loading times! Then she had the cheek to suggest i remove the small flash movie from my page to make it run faster.

Unfortunately for her, the site of ours she chose to focus on is doing quite well at the moment, so when she searched for "epos solutions" in msn.co.uk she found that not only do we have an Overture sponsored listing in first place, but our site also comes up in first place in the natural results (our sister company comes in second).

Anyway she's going to send me some details across and i'll keep you guys posted if i find anything else out. Be nice to hear if anyone else has had dealing with them..

Cheers
Will

For some reason this search engine optimisation company runs Adsense on their website (which, by the way, doesn't work). I'm not impressed with thier site and their claims. One of their customers has a PR3 and others have PR4s on their main page.

No, i wasn't too impressed with their site either. I called a couple of the companies on their Testimonials page. A couple of them didn't answer the phone but one guy told me that they don't do any marketing for him but he does use the "Build you own website" package they offer. He seemed happy with their service but not ecstatic. I think i'll definatley steer clear of these guys.

Cheers bhartzer
Will

Hmm... I would never go with this site.

Have to laugh... had a woman call up and promise me first place rank for the top 100 search engines...

Of course I kept her on the phone from the uk for an hour to extract exactly how they proposed to do that. (just out of principal)

Anyhow, when I said ok, write up the agreement, but I want 100 keywords ranking in first place, (even sent them a list), they told me 10,000$ (underpriced too).

In the end she really didn't know much about seo, but you could here the other guy in the background coaching her on what to say.

I told her, you are promising the world, for practically nothing, not telling me how you are going to do it and worst of all. I had dialed up their web page... 404, no pr.

So, you want to fix my website...but you haven't done your own yet? And you want me to give you a check for 10,000? Then, if you don't do what you say you can do I can just take a trip to London and try to track your boiler-room down? The poor girl. I was under the impression that she really didn't know what kind of scam she was involved in. I really should post the contract...it's funny.

L

It's not a scam. Nobody's taking the money and running. It seems like to me they're just a hosting company that had a hair brain idea to sell SEO services, and probably a crappy one at that.

They have a "it's 1996" internet mentality.

Those guys/gals calling you are never the ones doing the actual SEO work, so they have very limited knowledge about the process.

They think that business owners/webmasters are so busy with work we don't have time to 'fool around with that gee golly web site thingy'.

But If anyone here ever gets cold calls from 'seo' companies, just have fun with them, question everything they say and make them bow to the higher powers.

Play with them, if you look at their handiwork, it consists of a highly optimised "hidden text" doorway page, with a flash redirect. Dont think they have any real idea of what they are doing. THe major 25 search engines include some italian search engine, position tech (who???) and a number of search engines you have probably never heard of..

Save your money

You all know what happened to the "mouseover", "redirect", "doorway", "attractor", "whatever-you-want-to-call-your-spam-today" pages that Traffic-Power put on thousands of sites for their clients.

They all got wiped out by Google.



This stuff will go the same way. Don't get involved. Stay well clear.

It's bad...
Check out their "Property in Spain" link at the bottom right column in their
"links" (LOL) section...

hideous doorway stuff...(yeah...okay...let's call it i-site)...

stay way clear....

HI Guys

I had one of their 'Customer Service people' telephone one of my customers and say they could get in number one position on the top twenty five search engines gauranteed, or his money back.

Well of course he rang me to cancel his agreement. So I asked if I could call them to clarify what they were offering.

They said oh, no we meant first page not first place.

I was also tempted to ask who these 25 search engines were, because you could be on the first page for 18 of them but if that doesn't include google, msn, yahoo, altavista, lycos, aol, and ask jeeves, you may aswell not bother. And if you are on top for 18 out of 25 could they still say they met their promise.

Its not only cold outside its full people trying to rip you off.

Well they did a good job for me my site was in trouble but after the work they did I got results. I introduced a friend but it didn't work for him and they did give him his money back.

So at least they do what they say they will do.

In response to alice2106, If you would like examples of the "practises" used by this organisation I would be more than happy to provide you with the list.

I did not provide any critique as to whether or not these techniques worked or not as you have said that they worked for you. All I said is that these techniques were somewhat dubious and at some point could be construed as spamming and dealt with appropriately.

You raised the point why did we ask simple questions. Simple look at the dates on most of the post, and you will find out they are reasonably old. A SEO is only as good as his results, and I would be more than happy to provide you with the evidence of successful SEO (without the spamming !!!!)

These forums are here for responses to questions and opinions both good and bad.

[ Message was edited by: JimBot 07/20/2004 10:54 am ]

You say

"I would be more than happy to provide you with
the evidence of successful SEO (without the spamming !!!!)
"

Yes please lets have a look.I'm fascinated. You have a page rank of 5/10 with only a couple of backward links. The potential is superb.I would suggest that even without the backward links your page rank would remain the same.

I am currently exploring multiple techniques for listing only in Google. I have a team of 5 people all committed to this task and the information we have is based on fact and is looking very promising.

The domain name really doesn’t matter and it was. Plus the first file on here is 05/28/2004 07:34 Not old at all.

Top-pile use similar techniques to itscoldoutside but another company you may wish to visit is highposition.net now they are funny.


[ Message was edited by: JimBot 07/20/2004 10:57 am ]

Please send us your address, I would be more than happy to provide you with links. By the way I have since changed jobs, and updates to the site have not been done for a fairly long time, as management at the company did not think that SEO was important during development of sites.

Forum Admin are not going to take kindly if this thread continues in a personal vein.

I'd wrap it up, right now; before someone starts using their cluestick on this thread.

Hiya everyone
I joined this site as I ran a check on a company called "Its Coldoutside"
A few of you had added comments about them and I wanted to add mine.
Well here goes, yes I stumped up the 499 pounds and 30 pounds a month for 12 months. I have had nothing but headaches with these. The contract finished last week and I received an email from the saying they now wanted 160 pounds a month to continue
I have emailed them 7 times, faxed them 3 times and made 5 phone calls ( I live in the Middle East so this wasnt cheap) Still today I have heard nothing.
Just wanted to add my 2 pennies worth. DONT TOUCH THEM!!

Have a great day
Samantha