Listen to mins. 4-5 and you’ll hear ‘Google Guy’ Matt Cutts say the reason .edu’s and .gov’s have such high PageRank, and thus are great sites to get links from, has more to do with the age of their sites and the quality backlinks they have.
For the longest time, SEOs - me included - estimated that in addition to the usual suspects, these sites were such great domains in the eyes of Google because of the difficult process of getting such URLs, usually involving human intervention. Anyone can get a .com; not everyone can get a .gov.
(Video)
Such commentary isn’t good news for the .jobs domain.
When acquiring these domains, there is a high level of human intervention in the approval process. Theoretically, this would give .jobs a leg-up in the algos because of the higher level of trust. Real jobs; real companies. Not so, says Matt Cutts.
Ray Fassett of .jobs replies to the video:
I don’t see it as a hit per se. First, efforts to optimize a .jobs site will produce search engine results with Google. You can’t escape the effort required. Secondly, regardless of Google, we have an obligation as the licensed operator to ensure that .jobs URLs contain jobs content for users of the Internet. Following through with this mission will get us relevance in some capacity at Google, I am confident.
Time will tell how this plays out. Some SEOs still debate whether Matt is being totally truthful or not. I tend to believe him. To lie would be “evil,” right? Plus, Matt usually does a great job of being truthful, while not giving away Google’s secrets.
Regardless, there is no denying the fact that having a homepage and essentially a niche job site dedicated to job content at a particular employer’s site is helpful as search engine optimization goes. And having “jobs” in your URL isn’t a bad thing either. Other benefits could show themselves if things go one way or another, but that’s all scenery at the moment.
However, much of the speculation and expectation about .jobs domains being a “silver bullet,” are probably over. It still comes down to good ol’ fashioned hard (and smart) work.
Job boards should treat themselves to an extra drink at Happy Hour this evening. Then get back to busily out-optimizing each other.
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Popularity: 2% [?]
September 1st, 2006 at 4:38 am
Joel, it seems to me that in a very short time there has been an 180 dgree change in views. Is this a debate that will fizzle out like the .biz adveture?
My POV (coudn’t ping here) http://recruitomatic.wordpress.com/?s=whataloadofrubbish
Amitai
January 8th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Is it just me or am I missing something?
Suppose the HR industry were to organize a movement to get all companies to post their jobs in a standardized format using HRXML on their own .jobs domain. This way the engines could trust the results were coming from real companies and even the most basic engines could pick up the results. Job searchers could be redirected to the front of the “search jobs” in the company’s career section (not that anyone uses the .jobs domain for searching anyway)
Why wouldn’t this work? Cheesy - why don’t you drive this?