Every once in a while I come across a really clever link acquisition strategy, and today there is an excellent discussion about it.
The strategy is simple. Create an easter egg in your website source code that is really clever and creative and cool looking, and it will likely generate lots of links from popular sites.
There is an excellent discussion on Hacker News about this today, since a tutoring website surfaced with a picture of Paul Graham, the creator of Hacker News hidden in the source code of their programming tutors page. According the to the website, they hid famous people from different categories in the source code for that category page.
This is a really clever way to generate industry relevant links. If you go to this page, and look at the source code you will see it. www.tutorspree.com/browse/new-york-ny-tutors/computer-programming (its too big to take a screen shot.)
It turns out, many other websites use their source code like this including Barack Obama.
As you can see, they hid his logo in there.
There are other websites that use Easter Eggs in their source code to attract top talent. Like Seomoz.org, zappos.com, and vimeo.com Some of it requires breaking open javascript.
There is a guy hidden on the homepage of Tutor Spree, And it looks pretty cool, check it out.
The best I saw on the Hacker News Discussion was Last.fm hiding instructions in their Robots.txt file.
Bottom line, these are some really clever and inexspensive ways to attract links and social shares.
I am especially impressed with Tutor Spree targeting big influencers in each industry, to get that industry linking to that category page, like getting Hacker News to link to the programming tutors page by including a pic of Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator in their source code comments.
Brilliant!
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what are some of the sites that puck these up? This seems pretty easy to implement.
Love the Last.fm robots.txt file, I might have to add that to my site. 🙂
If you find their method clever, why don’t you link to them???
That’s nice but I am confused that who exactly it will encourage someone else to get linked to your website and to earn back-link from them. Little more insight would be really great.