Hardik Thakkar on Web Development, Internet Economics and other unrelated things

When moderating the comments of another of my blog late last week I was surprised to see one very spammy comment linking to a page on Indian Express’ Website (http://expressindia.com). On clicking the link I was redirected to a ‘Buy Phentermine Online’ page, the link was: http://www.expressindia.com/adlinks/pharma/phentermine.htm and while it has now been removed from the website it was very much active as late as this Monday.

You can check out the extent of the spam by searching for this link on google, or click here. You can see 281000 webpages containing the link. Google’s cache of the page also shows the contents of the page earlier.

If you check out the lower left corner of the main page of the Indian Express site, there are many more such spam-related links, mostly catering to Phentermine.

In case you did not know what Phentermine was it is a weight-reduction pill but is more famous for the high it gives to it’s users; quoting from Wikipedia, “because it is similar to the amphetamines, individuals may develop an addiction to it. Hence, it is classified as a controlled substance in many countries.”
It is very hard to believe that Indian Express Group would be actively involved in such spamming as they are probably one of the ‘cleaner’ newspapers when it comes to content, with many of their investigative journalism giving both current and past Governments many sleepless nights.

I doubt if the company may be profiteering from this whole thing, probably the web-division of the firm might have been sourced to another agency or that the company may have hired a very shady SEO. Whatever the case maybe this is a perfect example of how vested interests have been increasingly taking advantage of lack of awareness of IT in the managerial level of corporate world here in India.

Sucheta Dalal, star financial columnist of Indian Express, has regularly exposed the unethical side of Indian businesses I would to hear her views on this issue