This post will break from the usual employer review format, because there's no point in getting into nuance and detail with The HOTH. Here's all the review you need for them: AVOID. They're a rotten company from top to bottom for both clients and freelancers.
Yet they keep rolling along doing business, popping up in top positions in searches for SEO services and freelance writing opportunities and advertising everywhere. If their product is so awful, how do they keep managing to make a profit year after year?
Well, it's a combination of several things. One is that the company is a Sith Lord of dirty internet tricks and has absolutely no shame or sense of corporate responsibility. Another is simply the rock-bottom pricing, which they use in conjunction with grandiose promises to target content managers and financial decision-makers who don't have enough experience to understand what they're getting into.
Today's post is going to be about how the sausage is made at The HOTH from an insider perspective. It's meant to be a warning and guide for not only the desperate freelance writers out there, but for clients being lured toward the shoals by their siren song of Walmart discount prices for unbelievably sudden and dramatic improvements in traffic.
Basic Bitch Backlinking
You have to understand a bit about how SEO works to understand why The HOTH's process is so bad. One of the big factors that determines where a site lands in the Google search results is Google's perception of its "authority" on any given topic. One significant component of authority is how many other websites are linking to it and citing it within the context of that particular search topic.
In fact, Google's most basic model back in the 1990s was to simply count how many other sites were linking to a particular page to determine its search ranking. Of course, that system was quickly gamed by throwing up lots of low-quality links all over the internet - free websites, forums, comments, basically anywhere a link could be spammed.
The process was called "backlinking" and was the root of the SEO industry. It also began a decades-long running battle between Google and "black hat" SEO agencies looking to game the system. Google's search business would be ruined if the search keeps delivering crappy results full of spam and jibberish, so they had to constantly refine the system to account for the tricks the SEOs were using. The SEOs came up with new tricks, Google responded, and so on and so on in an ongoing arms race to this day.
HOTH History
So, all of that is important because The HOTH has become the internet's most prominent vendor of these black hat backlinking methods.
The company actually started relatively late in the game - they were founded in 2010, when some dude in Chicago decided to name his new digital marketing company as an acronym for Hittem Over The Head, complete with a poorly-drawn thuggish monster holding a club as their company logo.
Anyway, even though Google was already deploying significant algorithm changes to combat black hat backlinking by 2010, The Hoth still saw value in using outdated SEO tricks to sucker unwitting businesses.
It's comical that they try to stress "white hat" practices in their marketing today, because their core business model hasn't really changed in nearly a decade now. It works like this:
1) Create fake "authority sites" using a combination of free web hosts and really cheap ones with a very basic site/blog slapped up using Wordpress or something similar
2) Pay writers as little as possible to create posts and articles that are basically plagiarized by hastily Googling the subject matter and rewriting top results
3) Populate the fake authority sites with these cheaply-made articles and insert backlinks into them
4) Hope that client content managers are inept or busy enough to not notice that The Hoth is hurting their SEO rather than helping. If they do notice, it's on to the next sucker.
HOTH Business Model
The HOTH has added a "suite" of services over time, like creating content directly for client sites. However, no matter what service they offer, here are the two big problems at the back of it:
1) They don't pay nearly enough to contract with quality content creators. For example, their price for the "HOTH Boost" service is $149 USD for 250 posts. Even if all of the money you pay was going to the writer (and it most certainly isn't), that's less than $1 per post. Who on earth is working for those rates? I'll give you a hint - it begins with an "o" and ends with a "sourcing." The quality is exactly what you would imagine at that price point.
2) Their backlinking techniques are constantly flirting with disaster. They're basically always trying to stay one step ahead of being noticed by Google. Once Google notices their fake-ass sites and flags them as part of being a backlinking network, they are not only worthless to your site SEO but will actually do damage that you have to clean up by disavowing those incoming links.
How HOTH Sources and Treats Freelance Writers
The company's go-to move has been hiring writers from the Philippines at a rate of about $3 USD per 600 to 1000 word article. As you can see from an old job posting still on the web, they outright instructed the Filipinos to plagiarize by spinning and "rewriting" existing web content. As anyone who has placed a bulk order with them can probably tell you, they aren't real picky about the English-speaking abilities of their Pinoy hires.
To be as fair as possible, a couple years ago they started making a hiring push for native English-speaking writers residing in the United States. The pay is at the lowest end of the scale possible for a competent native writer (3 cents per word pre-tax), but that isn't even the real problem. The problem is that they insist on having writers work without contracts, and with no scope of work specified - potentially unlimited revisions, and all sorts of crazy conditions to meet their deadlines and backlinking requirements. They also want writers to watch a bunch of "training videos" without compensation for that time.
They simply can't keep an adequate writing bench given those rates and terms. Anyone who is capable of passing muster can go work just about anywhere else tomorrow for 2x the pay bare minimum unless they're utterly lazy or lacking in ambition.
What All This Means for a Business
Going with The Hoth is a classic case of "penny wise, pound foolish." The prices are tempting, but once you get a load of gibberish writing delivered you'll realize that you'll have to pay editors to practically rewrite it from the ground up to get it into a state that isn't embarrasing to your company (or potentially a legal hazard if it's plagiarized). Their backlinking techniques are also straight out of 2006 - at best they won't really do much of anything to help, at worst they'll earn you manual penalties from Google after they identify you as paying for links.
The reason these "private backlinking network" sites still survive is because they can actually help in one specific circumstance - if you're bootstrapping some low-budget no-name Amazon affiliate site. They can actually get some of these sites enough traffic to get them first- or second-page search result placement in less competitive keyword markets, which can then lead to enough legitimate traffic to actually make a little money. The thing is, you're at constant risk of being manually penalized by Google and having the whole thing fall apart on you, which is why only these nobody sites with no better options do this. If you already have an established legitimate business site, you likely already get enough organic traffic to be too big for this black hat bullshit to be productive for you - you're already past the stage where a bootstrapped "cheating" site would want to start cutting ties with their fraudulent backlinks. The HOTH will happily market to you, blow smoke up your ass and take your money anyway, though.
Further Reading
Maybe you think this is all just some sort of personal sour grapes. OK, fair enough. Trusting just one internet source is the way you end up contracting with companies like The HOTH and getting your business in trouble. So to supplement the tale I've told here, check out these other links documenting how The HOTH really gets down:
* Detailed.com review from someone who used their services in December 2018 - "There’s no concrete way to know if the links you purchase actually work ... Digging deeper, I can see that many of the other blog posts on the site link to homepages with keyword-rich anchors and some of them are ridiculously spammy. They just have to be paid links ... I ordered “natural” guest posts and I’m pretty certain that is not what I received."
* Authorityhacker.com review from
someone who used their services in mid-2017 - "Ah, the HOTH. The used car salesmen of SEO ... they have this special tradition of selling their grey- and black-hat services as white hat ... I suspect this is a blatant PBN and that they are being fraudulent ... don’t buy this steaming pile of crap."
* DigitalMusicNews.com article from someone who caught them sneaking links into their site without permission - "The HOTH is a company getting SEO results through some seriously questionable means. Specifically by piggybacking on high-ranking sites without their permission ... The HOTH was either hacking into DMN or exploiting some secret deal to sneak links into our site ... The HOTH's rep dodged or evaded even the simplest of questions ... (Hoth COO) Papadeus was extremely evasive and constantly asked if he was being recorded ... Nobody should ever do business with The HOTH! This is a black hat SEO enterprise."
* NichePursuits.com - whole article pertains to their business model, but also a relevant detailed comment at the bottom about the kind of mess The HOTH can create for you to clean up
* A couple of good Reddit threads about them - 1 2
Maybe the notoriously litigious Disney will notice them and wipe them out since they own LucasArts now ... 'till then, avoid as both a writer and customer.
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