Explanations

This clue refers to the /robots.txt file that can be found in this site’s root directory (https://samwardjacobs.com/robots.txt). These files serve as a guide for search engine crawlers with regards to which pages they should and shouldn’t access. As a best practice, the XML sitemap should also be referenced here. Go there for a secret message.

To help with accessibility, all pictures used on websites have an “alt” tag associated with them. The content of the alt tag should describe the content or meaning behind an image so that it can be conveyed to visitors using screen readers. The password combination for this clue can be found in the image alt tag.

To determine whether or not a link should pass across authority (link juice) from one URL to another, a “follow” or “nofollow” rel attribute can be assigned in the HTML. Amidst the great sea of links, only 1 possesses a “follow” attribute, the anchor text for that link is the 3rd combination for the vault.

Possibly the hardest clue on this site in my opinion. To reveal the secret combination you need to add a query string to the https://samwardjacobs.com/clues/ page. Finding truth in the query for treasure alludes to what that query string should look like https://samwardjacobs.com/clues/?treasure=true. Plug it in and see if you notice any changes.

This should be fairly straight forward. Go to inspect element on Chrome, then navigate to the Console tab. You should find a secret message.

What is the search engine’s preferred path? Why of course, the canonical rel attribute that is used to convey to search engines the page they should treat as the most authoritative one. This is especially handy when using query strings in faceted navigation for an ecommerce site or any other application with lots of pages with near duplicate content. Check the canonical attribute for the /clues/ page and see what you uncover.

Truly an inspiring piece of literature. With all those references to meta data you should have thought to check that page’s meta description. Go take a look.

No links to show the way indeed. Pages that aren’t linked to anywhere on a site are called “Orphaned Pages”. You can find them using Screaming Frog’s “Orphaned Page” report. You should find https://samwardjacobs.com/orphaned-page/. I’d link to it here but then it wouldn’t be an orphaned page anymore.

Keyword cloaking isn’t anywhere near as prevalent as it used to be. Mainly because those kinds of black hat SEO tactics are quickly picked up on by Google and penalised. On the /cloak-dagger/ page you should be able to see a cloaked message just beneath the image. It has its visibility set to hidden and is the same colour as the white background, use inspect element to edit these CSS attributes.

This is a fun one. Add some nonsense to the page URL to make the error 404 page appear. See what it says.

Finding this clue without some kind of SEO software would be pretty difficult. The site contains only 1 301 redirect, find where it points to.

Nowadays all images should be uploaded in next gen formats like WebP or AVIF as they allow for better image compression which leads to smaller file sizes and quicker page load times. JPEG files aren’t as good by comparison. Crawling software should reveal the only JPEG file on the site – https://samwardjacobs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Lesser-Spotted.jpg.

The only product that uses SCHEMA markup is the toaster. The SKU attribute instructs you to use the price as the last vault combination digit. This use of SCHEMA isn’t best practice and is more for training purposes. For bonus points, find out why this product wouldn’t be eligible for a Rich Snippet on Google SERPs. You can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

To reveal this vault combination, you need to disable JavaScript. You can do this via a Chrome Extension or using Chrome Dev Tools. Once JS is disabled the vault combination will reveal itself.