Daily Mail uses Search Crawler File (robots.txt) to Advertise SEO Job

It’s possible that SEO types have a sense of humour!

Evidence comes courtesy of the Daily Mail, which has hidden a job advert for an SEO manager inside a file that should only really be read by search engine crawlers.

The job ad was discovered by eagle-eyed SEO man Malcolm Coles in a robot.txt file, which blocks the crawlers from indexing certain parts of the site.

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.

It is a file that is not listed in search engines and users have to type the address into the URL address bar to find it.

Can’t Be Found On Google Search

It is located at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/robots.txt but the lines concerning the ad are shown below:

Disallow: /home/ireland/
Disallow: /home/scotland/

# 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

# Begin standard rules
# Apply rules to all user agents updated 08/06/08
ACAP-crawler: *

Very clever. People who don’t read these kind of things need not apply, obviously.

Maybe this should be the way for companies to advertise SEO in the future – use files that any SEO enthusiast should know to check when analysing a website…….