Chief Jobster Jason Goldberg recently commented via his blog that Jobster was a great tool for creating personal profile pages that get indexed and ranked well in Google.
I (pleasantly) recently observed that individuals’ jobster pages (user-generated Jobster profiles and career content … are performing very well in Google search results — much better than ever anticipated.
He’s right.
Unless you’re famous, few people are searching for your name or credentials, but for employers doing a little background check, there’s a decent chance of Jobster pages showing up.
However, a much better benefit – call me an SEO geek – resides on the profile pages: Backlinks to the URLs of your choice.
Yep, Jobster is essentially handing out free ‘Google juice’ to help site(s) rank better. Considering the fact that Jobster is a pretty trusted site, it’s a nice link to have.
Additionally, Jobster’s tagging pages are being indexed.
If you select a few obscure tags for your profile, there’s a decent chance of that page being picked up and ranked well. For example, a search for “hr seo” brings up a Jobster page at No. 2. (I just love the parasites hoping to hijack my brand, by the way.)
Granted, not very many people search “hr seo,” so it’s low hanging fruit and not a huge deal. On the other side of the coin, don’t count on creating a tag for “nursing” and hitting Google’s Top Ten.
Giving away this kind of power to those who understand SEO – and how to abuse it – can be quite dangerous for Jobster.
It inevitably creates an environment for Black Hats to pollute the site with fake profiles and loads and loads of spam. If this happens, it should come back to hurt Jobster in a big way. They’ll have to turn into police and / or set-up solutions to discourage such abuse. To not do so is risking the wrath of Google.
The good, the bad and the ugly of social networking online. Jobster is knee deep in it. Should be fun.
HRSEO : CheezAds 
: uCheez : Oaseo : Jobs : Join : BWJ Popularity: 4% [?]
September 28th, 2006 at 8:22 pm
Alright, I’ll bite…. SEO slueths… I’m a restaurant recruiting firm and would like some [more] Google juice…. Suggestions?
October 2nd, 2006 at 9:14 am
I see how fun it really is. I just created a Jobster account and created a profile page for myself. I used tags such as “writer web, basic web design, blogger, writer.”