sounds a bit rube buddy...if there are some spammers frm India, that doesn't gives u the right to call'em 'devious', 'lack self-respect' and 'uneducated'...bettr take ur words bck, mods here r strict ...
I dont know why people here target only Indians!! may be we Indians are better in what they do?? I had seen topics all over the forum calling Indians cheats and scammers!!
All Indians are not like that If you are an indian who isn't falling in this category then this doesn't applies to you. But it is true that some Indians do have lots of time on their hand and they are in a hurry to make some dollars. That is why this kind of things are happening. It just doesn't means there are no professional webmasters from India. There are but then they are not interested in this kind of deals. Those who are running offices, outsourcing this etc are just killing the quality sometimes. Please note sometimes. I am not offending anyone. It doesn't applies to you if you are not doing this I myself have got this kind of offers of designing a free header for me, giving me free icons set, etc. Why the hell I would need a free icon set from a guy in return for a link from my sites don't know but maybe the trick might be working for them.
From off-shore call centers to link gatherers, it is all the same. You can relate it to knock-off clothing in China. Wherever the labor is cheap, the money will follow. You cannot blame this all on India. If you follow the money, it goes to where the people are who work the cheapest. This is a 'two-way street'.
Labor in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine is cheap too but people from that country's never do such things as people from India do...More over there are many best SEO specialist from these country's... I think it is all about mentality... I don't wont be against people from India - I make some quality link exchange with them, but there are to many request about link exchange with low quality sites...
In one my sites, India accounts for 2900 visits out of the last 192,000. So 1.5% of my traffic is from Indian IP's. Looking at my comments caught in spam filters that are blatant spam (viagra, casino etc) more than 7% are Indian IP's. Looking at spammed links to competitors manually that make it through the filters, roughly 20% of these are Indian IP's. Lame link exchange requests via the contact form (which by the way specifically says don't annoy me with link exchange requests) - I don't have exact numbers, but close to 50% of these are Indian IP's. Competition cheaters - we're running a competition right now to give away a free football shirt - I've removed 10 cheating entries today - all Indian IPs (8 of them were one person, one other lazy cheater gets the credit for the other two) So for me as a whole, Indians are carrying out way more spam and crap than they should be. with 1.5% of my traffic indian, 50% of the spam link exchange requests coming from them is massive. But you need to consider another important fact - most of the sites they are requesting link exchanges from, or are spamming my comments with, are actually British or American ran businesses - the Indians are only spamming because the other country people are paying them to do it so I don't think its exactly fair to blame all the spam on the Indians. The simple fact is you can pay an indian a couple of dollars an hour to spam or do menial computer tasks, you can't get anyone in UK to do anything at all for less than $11/hour. The spam and crap is always going to come from where there is a never ending supply of cheap labour.
@vic_mackey: Great post Vic. I like posts that have some stats to back up the statements. @jimroddy: You sound Indian. Are you Indian? Don't bother answering that question, we know you won't. I think Russia is just too busy with Serebro (Серебро). I don't live there and can't get enough of those hot babes!
I take it a step farther. I hit "delete" on any link exchange requests. I cannot guarantee the content of the other site, nor can I guarantee it won't be sold later to a porn site, warez site, etc. So I exchange links only with webmasters whom I know personally and are in my niche.
Same here. Per StatCounter, 1.5% of my unique visitors are from India. However, mine is a 100% noncommercial, nonprofit site, so I can't recall a single instance of spamming from those visitors.
I edited my contact form - http://www.fcfootballblog.com/contact/ and still get lots of daily link exchange requests, even when I specifically mention not wanting them. I get tonnes of commercial spam, mostly from Indian IP's on behalf of UK and USA sports good retailers, casinos and ticket resale agencies.
Hahaha, that is ironic because I got an email via my contact form from some random dude in Mumbai (I trace routed his IP address) that phrased his service almost exactly like that.
Just don't do any 3 way link exchanges. Also, for your info - Google devalues exchanged links. If it finds reciprocating links between 2 sites the links are both devalued. End of sentence. Check Matt Cutts blog, the official Google Blog and other similar sources for more on this. Exchanging links (since Google is the biggest constituent of internet traffic and searches) is now a complete waste of time.
I'm a bit skeptical about that. I have maybe a dozen reciprocal links with websites that are exactly in my niche. There is no way that should incur a devaluation. To the contrary, links to and from similar-themed sites are helpful to the visitor, and Google knows that.
I would still think they are devalued, even in the same niche. Google doesn't know they are helpful - one of the sites could be rotten quality. The fact its a reciprocal points to the fact the links most likely aren't editorially given.
I would agree with that, Jim. Not all link exchanges are bad. Here is a quote from Matt Cutts back in 2006: There was a later post of Matt's that was more definitive about this, but I have misplaced the link. As far as the Google Webmaster Guidelines, it only states that "Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging " is frowned upon. What they mean my excessive, is anyone's guess. Keep it small, link to good & trusted websites and you should be okay. Of course, I have seen some hand-edited link exchange pages pop up in SERPs from time to time and they were fairly large and I question the trust value of some of the pages that were being linked to (maybe 95% trustworthy links trumps out the minority of bad links ???)
Hello Nirav, I am extremely sorry i was damn busy coding my friends website. Well first i added your link but then i thought that its not suitable for my tech blog, so i asked my staff members and we decided to remove it. Now we are not accepting any link exchanges! I already PMed you all this situation and still you posting here and there ! Grow up .. Kind Regards, Mandar