The Hoth Review – Is Their Link Building Service Any Good?

For this review, I tried out The Hoth’s guest post services to build 3 backlinks for my site.

The Hoth is a major SEO agency with a big reputation. The fact that they have built such a big business is impressive, but how effective are their services? Do their links work? Are they worth it?

There are definitely positives and negatives to using The Hoth. Follow my review to see my experience with this platform, what the links I got looked like, and whether they are a good fit for my SEO strategy.

The Hoth Review (3rd Party Reviews)

Before I purchased links, I did a bit of research into The Hoth.

At the time of this review, The Hoth has a good rating on Trustpilot (3.8 out of 5 stars) with a lot of positive feedback from clients.

There are mixed reviews on Facebook, with some great feedback and some very unhappy customers.

I guess the only way to find out whether The Hoth is worth it is to try it out myself.

My Experience With The Hoth

I bought three backlinks for this Hoth review. I gave each link I received a score out of 5, and explain what each website placement looks like.

Link 1: 3 out of 5

• Total cost: $320
• Domain Rating (DR): 49
• Ahrefs Rank: 712,398
• Referring Domains (DoFollow): 4.94K
• Total Keywords: 8.0K
• Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 1.6K
• Domain Relevance: 4 out of 5
• Content Relevance: 5 out of 5
• Content Quality: 4 out of 5
• Word Count: 1500 words

My first link was placed on a decent-looking travel blog. The website is clearly focused, with content that’s completely relevant to the travel niche my site is in.

There’s a real person behind the website, with their story outlined in the About section. This is a good sign, as it shows the website is genuinely cared for and maintains a good level of editorial control.

The link was placed perfectly naturally, over excellent anchor text that aligned with my keyword. It didn’t seem forced at all, and was placed in a way that will probably drive some good traffic to my site.

Here’s how my link was placed:

The traffic to this site is pretty consistent. There was a big drop in traffic at the start of 2020, but we can probably credit that to Covid with this being a travel site.

The page my link was placed on is indexed in Google, although its organic traffic is pretty much non-existent yet.

Overall, this was a good link. The site was authentic and properly curated. The link matches my niche, and I was impressed with the type of content on the site.

Link 2: 3 out of 5

• Total cost: $300
• Domain Rating (DR): 38
• Ahrefs Rank: 1,882,269
• Referring Domains (DoFollow): 1.76K
• Total Keywords: 13.9K
• Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 14.7K
• Domain Relevance: 2 out of 5
• Content Relevance: 4 out of 5
• Content Quality: 4 out of 5
• Word Count: 1000 words

This isn’t the best site. The domain rating isn’t great and the site covers a wide range of topics that don’t have all that much to do with my boating travel niche.

That being said, the guest post my link was placed on made sense, and offered some good, relevant content. I did a search and the page is already indexed on Google.

This is how my link was placed:

The placement seemed natural and made sense. The anchor text was perfect.

The site gets a decent amount of traffic, although it's quickly spiked up over a short space of time.

The site seems legitimate. The owner is easily contactable and puts herself behind the website content. This shows that there is a lot of control over what content gets published.

Overall, I was happy. Not the best site, but certainly not the worst site. There’s a good steady stream of traffic, and the content on the page matches my link well.

Link 3: 2 out of 5

• Total cost: $200
• Domain Rating (DR): 27
• Ahrefs Rank: 5,562,517
• Referring Domains (DoFollow): 1.2K
• Total Keywords: 137
• Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 1
• Domain Relevance: 1 out of 5
• Content Relevance: 2 out of 5
• Content Quality: 2 out of 5
• Word Count: 700 words 

I wasn’t at all happy with this link.

Let’s take a look at the website: 

There’s a total mix of content, covering everything from travel to real estate. And with the first featured article being about crypto, I just get a really sketchy feeling from this site.

And it shows in the content. Clearly, there’s little to no control over what gets published. The content is short, rushed, and covers any topic you can think of.

Just by looking at the site, you can tell it only exists for placing backlinks.

To make things worse, there's basically no traffic at all.

I don’t have much else to say about this link, other than it’s clearly just inserted into a site that aims to build backlinks - no matter how irrelevant or badly placed these links are.

Summary

The Hoth is a major SEO agency that offers a lot of services. In terms of link building they offer both guesting posting and link insertions (niche edits). Getting backlinks from them was an easy process, although the quality of some of the links could be questionable.

If you’re buying bulk links from The Hoth, I’m sure it will make a good difference to your SEO results. However, I was slightly underwhelmed with the link quality that I got.

The Hoth Alternatives

Interested to find out about more link building?

Read our roundup of the best link-building agencies.

• FatJoe
• Authority Builders review
• Outreach Mama

Also see our guides on link juice and how to get broken links.