technical seo puzzles and treasure hunts
When Bruce Clay said “we get to solve puzzles for a living”, he was talking about the unexpected quirks and conundrums SEOs encounter as part of the daily crusade for visibility, discoverability, indexability, and oh-god-it’s-set-to-noindex-ability.
It turns out there’s a niche in the SEO community for taking those issues and turning them into literal SEO puzzles, where you use your diagnostic and problem-solving skills (and devtools) to find clues in places only we would think to look.
Below is a list of the ones I’ve tackled so far. If you decide to take a stab at any of these, there’s a couple of things to mention first:
- Keep a notepad or spreadsheet open and write down how you found the answers and solutions as you go. You might not finish the hard ones in a single sitting, and losing your progress is like watching candy floss dissolve in front of your tiny raccoon eyes.
- Use your brain, not Claude/ChatGPT. It’s fine to ask how to curl as a different user agent or inspect a security header, but don’t just paste the URL into your favourite LLM and ask it for the solution. I’ve learned new tips and tricks in the process of solving these, so put the effort in and stop outsourcing your thinking.
I’ve tried to list these in order of difficulty to finish, the last one literally might be impossible to solve:
brightonSEO september ‘26 easter egg
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/beep-boop/
A nice easy one to start, the prize has already been claimed.
seopirates
https://seopirates.ralgar.one/
This one is a pirate themed treasure hunt. The solutions aren’t all SEO related and there are a few things that can trip you up (if you find an answer but the page 404s, try adding .html to the end of the URL) and the answer for the last puzzle might not show depending on which tool you use, so you might have the right solution but assume it’s wrong because you can’t see anything.
SEO the game
Created by Wouter van der Meij. This was the first technical SEO puzzle I tried and solved. I even got my name in the scrolling marquee!
the hunt
This one is difficult. Rather than having a path you follow, this one scatters clues across multiple pages and you have to return to the main one to input them. What caught me out is that some things that look like clues aren’t (and vice versa), and some pages contain more than one clue. I didn’t solve this in time to claim one of the 10 hall of fame spots.
hidden keywords
This one is new to me, I actually found it whilst writing this post, and I’ve been solving some of the puzzles. I have a strong suspicion that since this game is from 2020, at least one of its puzzles is unsolvable, as Google retired its cache functionality in 2024. If anyone solves 13 or 14, let me know.
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