Indian spammers

SEO is a business with a poor reputation - but the Indian sub-continent is an entire geographic region with a poor business reputation.

We discussed this issue before in the Platinax forums: Business India.

Although I have limited, but equally good and bad, experiences of outsourcing work to Indian developers, I’m generally appalled at the rank amateur behaviour of so-called businesses operating from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

For a start, my forums are repeatedly hit by dumb Indian spammers, who come into my forums to spam an advert for themselves.

Secondly, I run a couple of directories, and the Indian submissions are usually obvious:

• Submitted to completely inappropriate categories
• Link bombing on titles, ie: “Web design India SEM India SEO india weboptimization India marketing company India”
• Poor quality sites, often filled with attempts at geo-targeted spam (ie, filled with duplicate pages using title and h1 tags for India and USA).

Thirdly, of course, there’s Indian e-mail spam. I get a lot of mass spam from Indian companies offering web development and SEO services. This to me shows a general lack of professionalism, and doesn’t in the least demonstrate a proper attitude to business.

For example, I just received 27 copies of the same e-mail, from a Bangladeshi company claiming to be too impoverished to submit to my directory. The e-mails are simply aimed at random addresses on domains I run that happen to have a directly. The gall is pretty astonishing.

Overall, it seems that the IT industry has caused a boom in Indian IT. But India in general has a long way to go before many of its small businesses realise that issues such as professionalism need to come hand in hand with technology.

Until they do, Indian development companies in general are going to be all tarred with a perception of low business standards, and “webdevelopment” and “India” is likely to become as highly regarded as “e-mail” and “Nigeria”.