What Time Does The Super Bowl Start, He Wrote As A Headline To Game The Google Results

In perhaps the most legendary act of SEO trolling ever, last year the Huffington Post ran an article titled simply "What Time Does The Superbowl Start?" It listed the start time of the game, and little else.

It existed for the sole purpose of garnering internet search traffic from the thousands of people Googling "what time does the superbowl start?" It was perfectly planned, right down to the intentional use of "Superbowl" as one word—just what the random person would search for, but not the actual name of the Super Bowl. For days before the game, it was the number one search result, and still is, even though it hasn't been useful since last February. The post was sinister and dumb and ruthless and brilliant, and a good indicator of why the HuffPo's traffic numbers are so insane.

Others took notice, not least of whom Gawker's designated traffic whore, who put up a brief post entitled "What Time Is The Super Bowl," without actually saying what time the Super Bowl is.

But guess who has an unironic interest in netting your web traffic, as well as actually making sure you know what time the Super Bowl starts? The NFL. To wit, they've put up a sparse splash page with the headline "What time is Super Bowl 46?", complete with SEO-critical URL text "What Time Is The Super Bowl?" So now, when you Google "what time is the super bowl," guess what comes up first? Well played, NFL.com. I look forward to your post being aggregated on HuffPo.