Donkey Cutts: SEO The Game - Why we made it
John Stirzaker·Feb 14, 2014
With SEO, it feels like it’s a constant battle keeping up to date with what is and what isn’t allowed. Not helped by the sometimes conflicting advice from industry professionals you’re often left wondering what to do for the best and simply not knowing which way to turn. You no longer know what is classed as white hat and whether dodgy black hat links pointing at you are damaging, or simply not being counted. With all this in mind you’re naturally anxious when the penguin & panda algorithms are coming.
We believe our netvouchercodes.co.uk site is currently subject to a negative seo attack, due to links like these, where someone has linked to us with the anchor text “disappointed”. We also recently had to disavow the entire tumblr domain as someone had created lots of automated one page blogs with money terms linking to us. On top of this, we have also had to disavow 1000’s of links that supposedly top ‘white hat’ SEO agencies had built for us over the last couple of years.
We are a creative company, whose creativity was being stifled by having to spend too much time in a negative mindset doing work to combat poor historical link building and negative SEO. We became so fed up of spending our time doing these morbid tasks that we took the conscious decision to spend some time on what we’re good at and do something creative.
Running a website these days sometimes feels like a bit of a game, full of different challenges. You have to try & combat baddies like negative SEO & black hats. You have to create great content & collect white hat links as your reward. All this whilst doing your best to avoid the next penguin & panda that’s coming your way!
So with this in mind, we had the crazy idea of creating a retro platformer that pays homage to donkey kong, to gamify the challenges mentioned above! Even better, we made the star of the show the one & only Mr Cutts (we hope he doesn’t mind) with a supporting cast of some of SEO’s brightest minds (you’ll need to guess who they are by playing the game!).
We hope you enjoy the game, you can play here.
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