Play Donkey Cutts SEO yourself right here!
Possibly the best SEO-related internet game I’ve ever played (not to say that I’ve played a lot). Donkey Cutts is an addictive homage to the one of the most famous retro platform games, the original Donkey Kong. Much like the objective of SEO, the objective of the game is simple. All you have to do is get to the Google Goal and rank high in the SERPs. Easy? It’s never that easy. You have to try and collect as many social signals as you can along the way to increase your rank, whilst having to avoid the onslaught of penguins and pandas that will issue you with a 10 point penalty (but if you jump them, you win 10 points!). If you create awesome content along the way (in other words, if you bump into Gangnam Style’s PSY and go viral), you gain extra links and shares and become temporarily invincible against the penguins and the pandas who just want to bring you down! And as you can guess, black hats are a no-no but white hats are a yes-yes. Avoid and obtain each one appropriately.
Net Voucher Codes states that the reason behind the creation of this game was because they recently underwent what they believe was a negative SEO attack and, on top of that, also had to disavow thousands of backlinks that their previous top white hat SEO agencies had built. As a creative company, their passion is to create and they’re finding that having to constantly worry about SEO is preventing them from doing what they love; creating amazing content. The frustrations that SEOs face everyday, having to keep up with what is considered black or white hat today and whether it will still be that way tomorrow, is increasingly becoming more of a game with the industry experts themselves seeming to have no real clue either as they bicker between themselves. Net Voucher Codes wanted a way to gamify these frustrations in a light-hearted, humorous way.
And the result is this incredible example of shareable/linkable content. Not only because it makes you want to tweet about the game, but because you want to tweet your score and challenge others to beat it. After a few play-throughs I think that it’s not about the speed at which you get to the Goal at all, and that it’s better spend your time limit of 300 seconds to gather as many points as possible around the map.
I won’t tell you my high score as it’s rather shameful, but I would love to hear yours!
