Want an SEO job? Check out the Daily Mail’s robots.txt file …
Want a job as SEO manager at the Daily Mail? Check out their robots.txt file (just don't tell them you saw it here ...). In the middle it says:
# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this you're the kind of techie we need!
Daily Mail's robots.txt file contains an SEO job advert
Genius! You could also contact Mail Online MD James Bromley on Twitter.
For those who don't know, the robots.txt file is how you tell search engines which pages they can and can't crawl on your site to include in their index.
In the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated - Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.
If you liked this post, I've got lots more about SEO (try this story analysing Google's keywords tool). I also blog about newspapers a lot - such as the Daily Mail (this story was popular recently on iDosing) and lately a lot about the Times paywall.
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This is brilliant idea. No need to do any tests in the interview when you can do it through the advertising process.
Haha nice easter egg, you could always use one of the many Firefox page monitoring tools to automate it or if you are using chrome try and PageMonitor plugin... here is a post with a whole lot that work so are paid thou
http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/06/07/page-monitoring-services/
Quite amusing, I checked yours and expected to find some form of easter egg or hidden message but to no avail!
Maybe there's some form of robots.txt easter egg treasure hunt we could get going or something :p
http://www.nextthing.org/blog/cache/incharge.org.robots.txt
: P
Out of everything I could have possibly expected, that was not it!
We have developed a free tool to monitor robots.txt files.
It's an interesting way to keep an eye on competitors and also monitor your own sites if you have dedicated development teams.
http://robotto.semetrical.com/
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
If you have enough to be checking out the robots.txt on the daily mail website, and you are not a robot, then you are likely not a SEO in demand.
I am always skeptical about using such means to find new employees, though messages hidden in code, are always rather amusing, as you point out.
[...] Generally you won’t find many people checking the files unless their technically minded, passionate about SEO and curious. The Daily Mail of all sites thought it would be an ingenious idea to place a job advert in the file and SEO consultant Malcolm Coles discovered it. [...]
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
Now this is something which is 'out of the box'.
But I wonder who would be checking the robots.txt of Daily Mail? Who has time for that?
Nabeel,
I've been doing it for a while now.
It's worth occasionally checking the robots txt of newspaper sites (if you're interested in the industry) as they tell you which search engines they've blocked (eg News Now), and, as I say above, sometimes which URLs they've pulled for legal reasons.
you realized you replied to a spam comment right?
[...] Coles spotted that the Daily Mail, one of the UK’s largest papers, changed their robots.txt file to include [...]
They've got some really good links out of doing this if nothing else.
So have I
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
Yes, nice post Malcolm.
I will be checking out the newspapers online robots.txt in the future just for fun.
Did you find this or someone else?
[...] Malcolm Coles Comments FB.init("115607445126470"); Or use our traditional comment system by [...]
[...] type of candidate that the Daily Mail hopes to attract. Here’s the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
[...] Who but a die-hard SEO fanatic would spend the time poking about such files? At least until blogger Malcolm Coles came across the ad, it was a genius way to filter out the hoi [...]
[...] del humor ¡y de la oportunidad! Quién podría estar mirando ese archivo más que un SEO. | Vía Twittealo Facebookealo Esta entrada fue publicada el 25 de agosto de 2010, fue archivada [...]
Great spot Malcolm..Yeah,a lot of publishing sites use their robots.txt as a great tool for advertising. I've seen a few recently.
http://www.seogneration.co.uk/
Hey Malcolm... how many more hits have you had to your robots.txt since this post? I know I checked it... shame analytics can't pick that up!
Dunno. Have had 5,500 views of this post though! Better put something funny in it I suppose. *Goes to look for ASCII art*
Malcolm I have to applaud your work! You clearly have too much time on your hands to be checking Daily Mail code
.. however what a diamond of a find. Robots used for recruitment .. I wonder what would happen if Google did that?
I've seen this :
http://www.nextthing.org/blog/cache/incharge.org.robots.txt
in supaswag's post.
Very funny !!
But is there an *official* syntax for robot.txt ?
Which are the valid directives, how can I put comments inside ? (etc etc...)
Thanks in advance
Irene
[...] the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy [...]
[...] SEO blogger Malcolm Coles revelation that The Daily Mail had hidden an advertisement for a SEO manager within a robots.txt file on the site (a simple text file that stops search engines recognising the file and its commands) [...]
[...] employing some secret-squirrel methods to impress attentive prospects. Recently the Daily Mail hid a job advert in the robots.txt file on their website, so only someone who was really interested in SEO would [...]