The HOTH 2.0: IT'S BACK - More Links. Faster Turn around. 100% Money-Back Guarantee

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SeoReborn said:
Ah man, looking at the package its good for my requirements, and I even considered being a bulk buyer in using HOTH as the back bone to my linking campaign, but the reviews killed it for me. I feel duplicate content issue is pretty serious. If we are to buy from you what guarantees that this issue won't happen again?
Click to expand...

Good question & thank you for asking it-

Here is the problem before that caused
duplicate content.

Since our writers write about every subject
under the sun, we don't expect them to come
up with original insights for each subject.
Between medical, engineering, legal, financial,
etc. topics, it just isn't realistic.

As a result, we encourage our writers to take
existing articles online and rewrite them - which
is common practice among article creation
services. Originally, we gave our writers the
following instructions: "make sure each sentence
has at least 3 variations, and spin phrases within."

Seems simple enough, right?

Well, apparently not. One of our writers thought
that it was ok to keep sentences from the
original articles as one of the 3 variations - and
voila, duplicate content.

What did we do as soon as we figured this out?

As soon as we figured out what was going on,
we changed our policy to be "make sure you
REWRITE each sentence at least 3 times, and
there is no trace of the original article."

Everyone has been instructed on the severity
of these instructions and we've implemented
a 0 tolerance policy for it.

Thus far, copyscape tests have shown this to
be extremely effective. I don't have an exact
percentage right now, but I think its safe to say
that the outputs are >60% unique, which is the
general standard for spun content. I've been
looking through a lot of the recent orders on
Copyscape Premium and 95% of what I'm seeing
is 5-15% duplicate - which is funny because its
usually sites that just share the wordpress/Squidoo
footprint (i.e. default sidebar text, footer text,
comment text, etc.).

Occasionally, I see something closer to the
30-40% range if copyscape actually picks up
another one of our spun copies, but like I said,
this is a good range to be in for spun content
& pretty much the standard.

Also - Keep this in mind about Copyscape -

Copyscape is very sensitive. Like I said, it
picks up all kinds of garbage like sidebar/footer/etc.,
text and does not differentiate. Along the same lines,
I was looking at an article about environmental
protection that we did and Copyscape picked up
another article, because both had the words "Saving
the planet" in the title and in the body. Let's be honest
here, there are probably quite literally thousands
of environmental articles with that 3 word phrase in
them, and I don't think each one looses credibility in
Google's eyes because of that. In general, its prone to
picking up lots of common phrases, including "Please
leave a comment," "Blogs We Like to Read," etc., not
to mention common phrases for your niche.

So What's Our Content Guarantee?

Our guarantee to you is that we're working hard to
deliver you the highest quality product and be completely
transparent and honest in our business dealings. Please
evaluate the information I've presented above about our
content writing improvements and evaluate if the methods
are up to your standards.

If you do place an order, I guarantee that if you find any serious
flaws with it, your order will be supported quickly and
professionally. Thus far, you'll notice that as long as the
customer was willing to cooperate, we've always resolved
the issue amiably and everyone was left happy.

We're choosing not to make a more aggressive guarantee at
this time (i.e. "If you don't absolutely love it, we'll refund you
200%, guaranteed!!!"), because our goal isn't to close a bunch
of sales real quickly. I'm not Billy Mays and this isn't a 2 minute
TV spot.

Our goal is to cultivate trust within this community for the long
run. The SEO industry is full of people with exorbitant promises
and no follow through. We have no interest in joining that club.

If you have any other questions, I'd be glad to answer them!

Please let me know if there's anything else I can do to earn
you business.

-AP
 


Thanks for the prompt reply Alex.

Regarding the quality of the content - "make sure you REWRITE each sentence at least 3 times, and there is no trace of the original article." Sounds like it would avoid duplicate issues. However we are dealing with people here and whatever the reason they could still make a mess of it. Unless of course there is another member who checks the quality of the articles.

In terms of SEO rankings, it is unreasonable to guarantee anything, however in terms of quality assurance, I don't think its unreasonable to have 200% refund for bad content - where the article is not above a certain % in uniqueness. Duplicate issues could harm our sites, there is a risk involved in taking up your service hence it should be visa versa too.

I feel i'll wait for more positive reviews before ordering.
 
So, just an update, since I like to remain factual in my review(s).

As I stated before, Alex seriously fucked up with duplicate content on my order. Although I'd have preferred a refund (which I didn't ask for) Alex took it upon himself to redo my 5 HOTH from scratch. Here is a short review of the redo.

I'm a firm believer that WMT tends to show mostly only links that are worth something. If the page linking to your site is untrusted, WHMT probably won't show it. That being said, in the first run with serious dupe content issues not a single one of the wordpress, blogspot or squidoo showed up as a backlink (and over a month later they still don't show). This time around 10/10 of the blogspot and wordpress links are indexed in WMT, which is 8 days after the report was mailed to me.

The squidoo page apparently got less love and hasn't been listed yet. I'll take a guess and say that this was because less links were pointed to it.

I can forsee an issue with the web2.0 properties which should be pretty easy for Alex to fix. All of the usernames chosen are very spammy, ie, 'xcvjq33' which means something like xcvjq33.wikidot.com which simply doesn't look good to anyone reviewing backlinks. Creating legitimate looking usernames which are unique is very easy, and should probably be done at a later date.

Still not a fan of the bookmarks or profile links, I feel they could be done better. The bookmarks are done from a very small amount of existing accounts, and the profile count is really quite small - given that google normally only indexes around 5% of profiles.

I'm a little bummed I was unable to measure any results in the serps. I think the redo helped, but I can't be sure due to a lot of other SEO work done at the same time. I didn't ask for the redo, so I wasn't expecting to be stop other work to monitor the results. The wordpress and blogspot not being penalized this time is encouraging.

Overall, I feel I'm still sour about the first round, and I know this service has plenty of room for improvement, but I might consider testing the service out again six months from now.
 
Insomniac, thanks a TON for your updated review.

I wasn't expecting it and it really means a lot.

Just a quick response to a few things you said-

I can forsee an issue with the web2.0 properties which should be pretty easy for Alex to fix. All of the usernames chosen are very spammy, ie, 'xcvjq33' ​

To be honest, nobody has commented on this to-date,
but its valid feedback and I appreciate it.

The production team reads this thread and I got an email
this morning saying that its already been fixed. From now
on we will be using names like "jonappleseed63,"
"xxwarthogxx," "jimrogersftw," etc.

The bookmarks are done from a very small amount of existing accounts​

This is on our development roadmap. We're working on a
solution that will be able to get a decent success rate while
hitting many more sites & accounts.

For now, we're definitely hitting our promised #s, but we are
aware that the bookmarks can be more diversified and that's
part of the game plan.

the profile count is really quite small - given that google normally only indexes around 5% of profiles​

This is a slightly more controversial issue.

We get a lot of clients with squeaky clean sites, or resellers
who need to deliver very clean links to their clients.

Are you know, profile links are by far the most controversial
and "spammy." As a result, we intentionally choose to keep
our numbers comparatively low.

With easy access to tools like DFB & tons of cheap x-rumer
providers around, anyone that wants more profile links can
easily get them, but the majority of our customers actually
don't. We may offer an upgrade in the future, like 10K
extra profile for $15 or something, but that's not on the
immediate roadmap.

----

Thanks again with your second round of feedback and thank
you for letting me address the issues you mentioned.

-AP
 
I ordered a bulk 5x5 Hoth order a couple months ago for a newly made site and I've been very happy with the results so far. We're marketing for 10+ keywords in some fairly high competition areas (bankruptcy attorney, etc.) for certain cities and we've gotten a few #1 rankings as well as multiple other first page results.

Just ordered 2 more bulk 5x5 Hoth's yesterday. Definitely looking forward to seeing what Alex can deliver for my other sites.
 
SeoReborn said:
Ah man, looking at the package its good for my requirements, and I even considered being a bulk buyer in using HOTH as the back bone to my linking campaign, but the reviews killed it for me. I feel duplicate content issue is pretty serious. If we are to buy from you what guarantees that this issue won't happen again?
Click to expand...

This is a valid concern, The hoth produced articles that were 69% duplicate content for me.

An no, they weren't sidebar elements or anything, copyscape does a pretty good job of excluding the sidebar content, and hones in on the page body content. Besides I was comparing a blogspot spun artcile [created by hoth] and it matched with an EZA article by 68%.. and obviously the sidebar content is completely different.

And that's just on copyscape, copyscape has nothing to do with google, and Google obviously has a lot more resources in place to detect dupe content and POOR QUALITY content much better.

Consider copyscape like a micky mouse dupe content checker to give an idea of what google might see, a bit like how we use yahoo site explorer to check backlinks, it's definately not complete but it's the best stuff we got out there.

Matt cutts has recently said in his blog that they'll be taking a hard line on poor quality content on blog farms and poorly produced content created by bad english speaking indian writers who work for $2 per 500 word article for instance, that obviously includes spun articles with really SHIT grammatical errors that obviously look computer generated.

I would like to see someone recently stating that they made huge SERP jumps with using a HOTH, I doubt anyone legit can confirm that.. (excluding 3 post count posters obviously).
 
Tiger-

Everything you've said is valid.

Regarding the 69%, as I mentioned your articles were
done ~1month before Insomniacs, when we fixed the
issue. So yes, they were high in dup content and we're
not denying that it happened. The point is that we've
since resolved the underlying issue and even Insomniac
came back to confirm.

As for Matt Cutts - frankly, IMO, he is one of the worst
sources of SEO information online. He (and Google) have
been making the same empty threats forever.

Don't buy links. Write engaging content. Be nice. Etc.

Its all trite advice with regard to SEO. If it were all the
case, this entire BST section wouldn't exist, Scrapebox
would have been a flop, Xrumer wouldn't be growing
years after its release, and TextLinkAds would be the
hollow shell of a once profitable business.

Clearly, in all of these instances, this is not the case.

All things considered, differentiating between "good
content" and "bad content" algorithmically is much
more difficult than something like finding profile links,
or scrapebox blasts, etc. I'm not bringing this up because
you were using xrumer on your site, I'm just mentioning
it as a point of reference, that the profile linkers &
comment spammers are in a much more fragile position
than actual content creators and/or spinners, even of
low quality. With that said, it doesn't look like the prior
is doing too bad, so I'm not too concerned about the latter.

Ultimately, its an unwinable debate. Google says certain
things. They do certain things. What each person chooses to
believe it matter of personal business decision.

My .02.

-AP

(Unrelated: Please don't disrespect Troy because he runs a
huge legal practice instead of spending his time on here. He
doesn't really deserve that.)
 
Just my two cents from "the Sandbox Guy".
I run several websites, mostly, BLEACHED TILL THREADBARE WHITE HAT, and I still go through sandbox at some time or the other. Everytime. It has become part of my life. I don't even bother looking at the SERP results. It is like looking at the stats.

I have never been able to understand the reason or rhyme. All white hat sites.
It is not right to blame any one technique for the sandbox. It is just Google's way of saying," I can ASS fuck you anytime I want. You CUNTS."

Sandbox also happens whenever a kitten is thrown to the river,
 
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Alejandro said:
Tiger-

Everything you've said is valid.

Regarding the 69%, as I mentioned your articles were
done ~1month before Insomniacs, when we fixed the
issue. So yes, they were high in dup content and we're
not denying that it happened. The point is that we've
since resolved the underlying issue and even Insomniac
came back to confirm.

As for Matt Cutts - frankly, IMO, he is one of the worst
sources of SEO information online. He (and Google) have
been making the same empty threats forever.

Don't buy links. Write engaging content. Be nice. Etc.

Its all trite advice with regard to SEO. If it were all the
case, this entire BST section wouldn't exist, Scrapebox
would have been a flop, Xrumer wouldn't be growing
years after its release, and TextLinkAds would be the
hollow shell of a once profitable business.

Clearly, in all of these instances, this is not the case.

All things considered, differentiating between "good
content" and "bad content" algorithmically is much
more difficult than something like finding profile links,
or scrapebox blasts, etc. I'm not bringing this up because
you were using xrumer on your site, I'm just mentioning
it as a point of reference, that the profile linkers &
comment spammers are in a much more fragile position
than actual content creators and/or spinners, even of
low quality. With that said, it doesn't look like the prior
is doing too bad, so I'm not too concerned about the latter.

Ultimately, its an unwinable debate. Google says certain
things. They do certain things. What each person chooses to
believe it matter of personal business decision.

My .02.

-AP

(Unrelated: Please don't disrespect Troy because he runs a
huge legal practice instead of spending his time on here. He
doesn't really deserve that.)
Click to expand...

you talk a good talk. most of the above is tripe though. the proof is in the pudding

eventsm.jpg
 
TigerUK said:
you talk a good talk. most of the above is tripe though. the proof is in the pudding

eventsm.jpg
Click to expand...

Fuck, you're annoying.

What probably happened was the HOTH started your site dancing, then started to get back to where it was initially before the dance. This is typically a few days before a large increase in SERPs. Before your increase, though, you hit the site with xrumer. 5,000 backlinks at once is a lot. I don't know if you pinged them, RSS'd them, or did anything at all to them but I'm more than confident in saying that you weren't sandboxed by the HOTH.

There is no "proof in the pudding" because you were stupid enough to rape your site with backlinks within days of each other. Learn about link velocity, especially when dealing with xrumer and 5,000 backlinks.

Before the whole "oh, viral this, viral that" is said, viral doesn't happen in a day. Viral doesn't happen in a week. It continues to happen for weeks.

You should fault yourself for being sandboxed, not the HOTH. If it was the HOTH, don't you think others would be chiming in to support your claims?
 
mgtarheels said:
Fuck, you're annoying.

What probably happened was the HOTH started your site dancing, then started to get back to where it was initially before the dance. This is typically a few days before a large increase in SERPs. Before your increase, though, you hit the site with xrumer. 5,000 backlinks at once is a lot. I don't know if you pinged them, RSS'd them, or did anything at all to them but I'm more than confident in saying that you weren't sandboxed by the HOTH.

There is no "proof in the pudding" because you were stupid enough to rape your site with backlinks within days of each other. Learn about link velocity, especially when dealing with xrumer and 5,000 backlinks.

Before the whole "oh, viral this, viral that" is said, viral doesn't happen in a day. Viral doesn't happen in a week. It continues to happen for weeks.

You should fault yourself for being sandboxed, not the HOTH. If it was the HOTH, don't you think others would be chiming in to support your claims?
Click to expand...

No way alex, there's no reason for the site to dance like that after its been stable at 14 for 3 weeks, for it to got from 14 to 60 to 100 means that the service is fucked. the xrumer helped try and recover it.. but the hoth carried on posting crap for the next 3-4 weeks and got the site sandboxed

i know this is a dupe account by alex, or dax or any of his team.
 
I've been ordering a few HOTHS each month for the same site since they launched in August. The only time my site moved down was when I Xrumer'd it pretty hard around Christmas...and then I bought 2x5Hoths and the rankings came back a few days after they were delivered. I think I posted about this a bit before you brought up your issues...

If the articles/web2.0's from this service were causing penalties, I'm pretty sure my domain would be beyond fucked by now as it probably has ~100 HOTH web2.0s + a pile of articles from each order. That's not the case at all.
:batman:
 
Yup, I'm gonna give it around 3 months till it recovers, the two urls that I did the hoth on both ar at the end of serps, the other urls are OK, but that have zero backlinks so they're in page 30 (rank 300).

It should bounce back after around 2 more months.

It's fixable ebcause the sites aren't off the serps, they just placed right at the end of the serps, if it was completely removed from listing then it would be a more serious issue.
 
TigerUK said:
i know this is a dupe account by alex, or dax or any of his team.
Click to expand...

That message wasn't created by me, Dax
or anybody on our team, lol.

I've already written many long messages
here answering your claims, so I have no
incentive to take on an alias.

Other people here have opinions too.

Best,

-AP

P.S. You KNOW that message wasn't written
by any of us because he's a Tar Heel (aka.
North Carolina fan), and we're all Chicagoans.
I mean, Michael Jordan went to North Carolina,
but that's kind of a stretch now :)
 
TigerUK said:
No way alex, there's no reason for the site to dance like that after its been stable at 14 for 3 weeks, for it to got from 14 to 60 to 100 means that the service is fucked. the xrumer helped try and recover it.. but the hoth carried on posting crap for the next 3-4 weeks and got the site sandboxed

i know this is a dupe account by alex, or dax or any of his team.
Click to expand...

Alex? Go check me out on BHW. Go check me out on WF, I don't give a shit. Same username.

What it comes down to is you being completely ignorant on SEO as a whole. You don't think it's normal for a site to drop 76 spots during a dance?! Are you joking? That's MILD for a dance!

My apologies to Alex but I had to speak my mind. This dude is just trying to taint your service when he hasn't a fucking clue.
 
a neutral stand point:

lets just say the HOTH service DID make his
site drop in rankings, that STILL has nothing
to do with the service they offer. It's a service
outlined in detail, of whats done - if what was
outlined in detailed wasn't done or was done
wrong - then yes the service is to blame 100%,
but no one can put blame on the outcome.

So the question at hand is, did they deliver exactly
what they said they would.

I'm going to stay on the safe side and not purchase
this, due to the duplicate content sensitivity going
on with google.
 
Another review: I got the report for my 2nd order a few days ago, and I only got aorund now to leaving a review again. I haven't hit page 1 but I've seen increased rankings and breadth of search visibility also go up since I got this service. My other activity for the site was some bulk forum profile and blog comment links. It's less than 2 months old in a relatively competitive niche. Overall I'm happy with the effects and I'm pretty confident in attributing most of the recent movements to this work.

To the guy above who lost his rankings, it may not be a dead cert they dropped due to the hoth. I've hammered sites before with xrumer and all sorts, and seen no ill effects. It could be just luck or a consequence uncommon behaviour for sites in your niche, for example. Just my 2c.
 
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