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We've all had these spam emails:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are a Delhi-NCR, India based, and leading web services company with main competency in SEO ( Search Engine Optimization), working as an outsourced vendor for many reputed SEO agency based in USA , UK , Canada and Australia…

Spam is commonplace but it seems India is the worst culprit when it comes to trying to ply SEO wares. 

As an aside do not buy SEO from these people. These emails have all the hallmarks of charlatans: they are usually from email providers like Gmail (more on this later), they aren’t personalised, they don’t link to case studies or their portfolios and they often use fake anglicised names.

If you only get the odd one then you can just delete them. If like me, however, you get them many times daily, they become really, really annoying — and time-wasting. The good news is if your website is hosted via cPanel there is a relatively quick and easy way to make sure these kinds of emails never reach your inbox.

cPanel allows you to apply filters to your email. As mentioned above these spam SEO emails from India share common traits so with a few carefully chosen filters you can make sure most of them don’t reach your inbox. Here’s how:

  1. Log into cPanel
  2. Go to Account Level Filtering or User Level Filtering
  3. If you chose User Level Filtering click Manage Filters by the account you wish to add the filters to
Account Level Filtering applies to every single email in the account; User Level Filtering applies to a single account

Now you can create individual filters. We’ll be creating nine filters: one for each of the main domains used:

The emails almost certainly contain one of the following:

It is almost impossible to prevent spam from the minority that use their own domain. Thankfully, few are stupid enough to use their own domain as they know they run the risk of getting blacklisted.

cPanel allows you to take several actions when an email is flagged by a filter. We’re going to send it to the Junk folder so you don’t actually lose it. This means it won’t reach your inbox but you can log into cPanel periodically (I do it once per week) and see if there are any legit emails in there.

  1. Create a filter called SEO Spam “India” (Gmail), From contains gmail.com and Body contains India, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  2. Create a filter called SEO Spam “SEO” (Gmail), From contains gmail.com and Body contains SEO, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  3. Create a filter called SEO Spam “S.E.O” (Gmail), From contains gmail.com and Body contains S.E.O., Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  4. Create a filter called SEO Spam “India” (Outlook), From contains outlook.com and Body contains India, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  5. Create a filter called SEO Spam “SEO” (Outlook), From contains outlook.com and Body contains SEO, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  6. Create a filter called SEO Spam “S.E.O” (Outlook), From contains outlook.com and Body contains S.E.O., Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  7. Create a filter called SEO Spam “India” (Hotmail), From contains hotmail.com and Body contains India, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  8. Create a filter called SEO Spam “SEO” (Hotmail), From contains hotmail.com and Body contains SEO, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
  9. Create a filter called SEO Spam “S.E.O.” (Hotmail), From contains hotmail.com and Body contains S.E.O, Deliver to Folder /.Junk
Change ./Junk if your hoster stores Junk in a different location

This will take about five minutes to set up but I assure you it will block over 95% of all Indian SEO spam.

If the spammers change their tactics I will update this post and keep a changelog.

Tim Bennett is a freelance web designer from Leeds. He has a First Class Honours degree in Computing from Leeds Metropolitan University and currently runs his own one-man web design company, Texelate.