Mr. SEO attacks Pandia and Indian SEO in a recent blog post, arguing that all Indian SEO companies are incompetent spammers.

This week’s article on the outsourcing of search engine marketing to India has caught the attention of Alan over at the blog Inside with Mr. SEO.

We welcome all kinds of fair criticism, but this blog post has a slant to it that makes us feel very uncomfortable.

This is the background:

The globalization of search engine marketing

In our article On outsourcing search engine optimization to India we discussed the recent trend of Indian companies establishing a presence in North America and Europe.

The trend is an interesting variation of the present outsourcing of all kinds of industrial production and services to India.

Search engine marketing is no longer a “first world phenomenon” only. It has become a globalized activity and this should be of interest to our search engine marketing oriented readers.

eBrandz, a case

As an illustration of this, we used one of our sponsors, the American/Indian company eBrandz, which has offices in New York, Mumbai (Bombay) and Singapore.

And yes, we did not hide the fact that eBrandz is a sponsor. This is how we came to know them.

We deliberately made no judgment as regards the quality of the services provided by eBrandz, nor did we make any comments on the quality of Indian search engine optimization in general.

Why? Simply because we do not know eBrandz that well; nor do we have any statistics measuring the quality of Indian SEO.

That was not the point of the article. The point was to give you, our readers, a good illustration of what is happening world wide right now.

All Indian SEO companies are incompetent

Alan over at Mr. SEO, however, seems to have read our article as unqualified praise of the quality of Indian SEO in general.

Moreover, he and Mr. SEO himself seem to believe that he has the documentation needed to underpin the following claim: Indian SEO companies stink. Or maybe not in so many words. This is what he says:

“As a working SEO, I can tell you firsthand that almost all Indian SEO is remarkably cutting edge - for the calendar year 1995.”

and:

“If you want paraphrased, stolen content; spammy, outdated linkbuilding methods or cookie cutter solutions to your site’s unique problems, you’re probably better off with an SEO firm from India. If, however, your business is your livelihood and you want to purchase services commensurate with the level of quality you offer your own customers, why take chances?”

And these claims are based on…? Well, apparently his own personal experience with some Indian companies.

And this is where it gets ugly. Based on that experience he makes a grand generalization, labeling in essence a large number of companies as amateurs or frauds, just because they are Indian.

All Norwegian SEO companies are incompetent

We know of Norwegian SEO companies using black hat techniques for their customers.

Actually, a recent story about how several prominent Norwegian firms were banned by Google because of the practices of one search engine marketing company, found its way to one of the major Norwegian newspapers. But that newspaper did not end up concluding that all Norwegian SEO companies are rotten to the core.

And boy, do we know about a large number of American SEO companies using unsavory techniques! Quite a few of them are right out incompetent. But that doesn’t prove that American companies in general should be avoided.

But somehow, the same demand for stringency does not seem to apply when discussing Indian companies. Is this because India is a third world country? Is it because Indians talk funny? You see where this is leading us.

Indian English

We would be very careful not to pigeonhole companies on the basis of national characteristics. Alan is not afraid, however:

“I would no more outsource the optimization of an English language based website to India than I would rely on my own severely lacking Mandarin skills to do business in Shanghai.”

It turns out Alan does not know so much about India after all. English is actually one of the official languages of India.

Language in India puts it this way:

“Only about three percent of India’s population speak English, but they are the individuals who lead India’s economic, industrial, professional, political, and social life. Even though English is primarily a second language for these persons, it is the medium in which a great number of the interactions in the above domains are carried out.”

After all, this is one of the reasons India has such a competitive edge in so many industries. They have a large number of people who speaks and write English pretty well. Please note that 3 percent of 1 billion people is, well, quite a few.

We know personally Indians that speak English with perfect British accents — and no, they are not Brits.

This doesn’t mean that being Indian in an English language market is without problems. Mr. Milind Mody actually made a point of this when we spoke to him. This is what he said, and this is what we quoted:

“Yes, there are cultural and language differences. The biggest challenge is the accents. But since we are working with American clients for over four years now, our team is comfortable working with clients with different accents.”

So, there is a problem, but it seems they are coping with it.

We know a bit about the problem of having English as a second language, as Pandia is a Norwegian site.

From time to time we do make grammatical mistakes (and some of them even turn out to be funny). Fortunately it seems that most of our readers and contacts are able to understand what we are trying to communicate. We guess that is why so many of them come back to the site.

We find it hard to see how an accent should stop an Indian SEO from writing decent copy, although we are sure it is possible to find examples of those that fail.

Pandia blooper

By the way, in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of our article Alan also attacks our writing:

“Apparently, being sponsored by an Indian company hasn’t helped Pandia’s writing staff. The title isn’t capitalized properly and the first paragraph has a grammatical error.”

Hmmm. We are following the capitalization practices of the British magazine The Economist (i.e. We do not Capitalize all the Major Words in a Headline in the Way Many Americans do), but that should hardly be made as an argument against Indian SEO. As for the grammatical error, we have not been able to identify it, but have tried to edit the paragraph for the benefit of Mr. SEO.

Is eBrandz a spammer?

Finally, our sponsor, the Indian SEO company eBrandz, has now been included in blog posts that labels all Indian SEO companies as incompetent spammers.

Is eBrandz a spammer? We do not know, as we have not spent the time necessary to go through all their projects. That was not the purpose of the article. But we did ask their CEO to tell us whether they did use black hat SEO techniques when serving their clients.

The reply from Mr. Milind Mody, which was included in our article, was clear:

“We do not use black hat SEO techniques. It’s not that we do not approve, but the fact is that most of our clients want long term results. Black hat SEO works (unless someone complaints about your site and you are banned) mostly for a short term.”

This makes very much sense to us.

Testimonials

Like many SEO companies, eBrandz has put up a lot of very positive testimonials from American companies at their web site. These testimonials do not prove anything, but they do at least indicate that they are doing something right.

Mr. SEO is not giving up, though. Mr. SEO himself does his best to prove that eBrandz is a spammer — in a separate post .

This post refers to a page on one of the sites referred to in the testimonial section of eBrandz we mentioned above. Apparently the description and keyword metatags of this page have too many repetitions of keywords.

It is not the most serious of SEO offences, but it is certainly a practice frowned upon by the search engines. Unlike Mr. SEO, we will ask eBrandz to comment upon this, and come back to you with more info.

In any case, this does not prove that Indian SEO companies are more or less trustworthy than the ones found in the US.

We refuse to make generalization based on nationality, gender or race, and we will continue to interact with Indian as well as American search engine optimization firms in the future.

We are glad India is making progress in so many areas, and hopefully the Indian search engine marketing industry will provide one small contribution towards the efforts of eradicating poverty in that part of the world. If that means that some American SEO companies lose a few clients, so be it.

Please note that Pandia does not provide SEO services. Mr. SEO does.

UPDATE

See also Mr. SEO’s resonse to this post.