Daily Mail newspaper plants job advert in robots.txt file

Perhaps unsurprising for a newspaper that probably has more SEO staff than, well, actual journalists, the UK’s Daily Mail is hiring a new Search Engine Optimization manager.

Interestingly, however, the job advert itself in fact appears in the newspaper’s website robots.txt file, which isn’t usually designed to be read by humans but is targeted at search engines bots to tell them what content shouldn’t be indexed and other related information.

The idea being that only particularly geeky SEO types would be snooping around in said file, the type of candidate that the Daily Mail hopes to attract.

Here’s the ‘advert’ as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy himself:

Now this is either clever, proof that SEO types have a sense of humour, or the best example of newspaper content being written for a search engine that we’ve seen yet.

I’ll let you decide.

Update: James Bromley (@jamesbromley), MD of MailOnline, tells us that the idea for the job advert was his, and in a tweet sent shortly after publication, was at pains to point out that “For the record, MailOnline has one SEO employee, and a lot more journalists”. That, of course, depends on how you define journalist, but we appreciate the clarification James.

(via paidContent)