Malcolm Coles spotted that the Daily Mail, one of the UK’s largest papers, changed their robots.txt file to include a line which reads:
# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk
How clever! They suspect some of the best SEOs out there would be sniffing around their robots.txt file and used it to recruit a new SEO manger. If anything, it is getting the word out there via the press that they are looking for a new SEO.
This reminds me of when Google added the User-agent: zombies Disallow: /brains to their robots.txt file on Halloween. Also, in 2006, Brett Tabke used his robots.txt file as his blog for a period of time.
I do not believe anyone every used it to hire an SEO before.
Related Topics: SEM Industry: General | SEO: Blocking Spiders
Premium member since 12/2008
I think Zappos has them one better. Here’s what we’ve been using in the header response for a year or so (see the X-Recruiting line….):
%curl -I http://www.zappos.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/0.8.34
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
Last-Modified: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:11:30 GMT
X-Core-Value: 3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
X-Recruiting: If you’re reading this, maybe you should be working at Zappos instead. Check out jobs.zappos.com
Cache-Control: max-age=3410
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:42:37 GMT
Connection: keep-alive