Life is getting a little better for news sites.
News items, images and even blogs creeping their way into Google’s organic search results is nothing new, but the preferential treatment news entities are starting to get, combining photos with content, is pretty significant.
Checkout the following search results for “online recruitment” and “sales jobs“:
No big deal, you say? Maybe. But images of any kind in Google search results tend to garner nice attention and improved click-thru rates – particularly on employment-related searches where images are mostly absent.
Oh, it’s just in the footer, you say? Maybe. But checkout a search for “Prince William.” The news item is actually within the primary search results, thus knocking out some site from the Top Ten.
Interesting, huh?
Now, let’s take it a step further. When an employer posts a job on Google Base, they have the option of attaching a small image. Now, what if job postings from Base, similar to the news items above (image and all) start showing-up in organic results for job-related searches? Hmm.
On a side note, by driving traffic and awareness, this also helps put Google in a favorable light with news entities. Newspapers have long seen Google as a double-edged sword. This may dull the blade a bit. Additionally, such a peace offering helps keep the flow of news content – and ad dollars – strong to Google. Vertical job search engines, who rely so much on job board content, should take note.
Popularity: 2% [?]
May 17th, 2007 at 8:39 am
I’m still down on Google Base for jobs. Until they make it easier to integrate an RSS jobs feed into it, its just not worth my time. They should take a cue from the Indeed.com’s of the world and allow job boards and others with RSS job feeds to simply give them our feed as is.
Also its not in the job seekers best interest to just get the Google Base jobs ‘center stage’. Its just not a comprehensive set of data to give them value. For the job seeker, Indeed and Simply Hired are still the ultimate job search experience.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Joel, you talk ALOT about Google and the things they sell and do. When you present your services to a company, do you ever talk about other search engines? I am an active Yahoo and AOL user. If you were coming in to present to me, I would ask you about other engines and what they are doing. I dont mean to be rude but some of your views seem very narrow sighted. If you go into a room of 100 people, and just talked about all the benefits of google, I dont think everyone would be listening. I think the ‘oooh, ahhh, google is cool so you should listen factor’ wont keep everyone in HR’s attention. Keep up the good work but I would love to see what the other portals are doing in terms of graphical and key word advertising.
Also, I know you delete any posts that are negative toward you but please leave this one up…. seriously, I am not trying to push buttons.