A Canadian-focused job search engine, Wowjobs.ca, is reporting Monster.ca is blocking its spider after almost a year of freely allowing the site to aggregate job content. In addition to blocking Monster content, it looks as though the employer sites Monster powers are on the block list as well.
Says Wowjobs founder Anuvinder Singh:
They have gone far and beyond protecting ‘their jobs’ and blocked off our access to the employers’ Applicant Tracking Systems that they host. So imagine an employer (say Nortel, Blockbuster or HBC) using Monster as an Applicant Tracking System and hoping to get free distribution of jobs to a number of verticals. But apparently, monster has a problem with this. Not only will they not let you crawl ‘their jobs’, but those of employers who are merely using Monster’s ATS.
It’s unclear from this case whether or not blocking Wowjobs is an isolated incident or part of a bigger strategy by Monster. It’s hard to argue that the job board was a drain on Monster’s servers if they had been spidering the site for almost a year. However, without a statement from Monster (which I won’t get), it’s impossible to say.
Singh said, “To make sure this was a deliberate act, we got a new server with a fresh IP address and crawled the jobs from a few employer sites that use Monster’s Applicant Tracking System. Remember, these are the jobs directly from employer sites using Monster’s ATS and not from their job board. And within 30 minutes of our starting this, this IP address was blocked as well.”
To date, more prominent sites stateside such as Indeed and Simply Hired seem to be spidering Monster without issues. However, it’s known that Monster doesn’t PPC advertise on such sites because they don’t have a “vertical job search engine policy” (whatever that means).
I have no doubt the growth of verticals are continually raising new questions for the leadership at Monster and that they would probably be OK if they all went away tomorrow. Is banning newer, foreign-based, or less prominent verticals a part of such a strategy? It’s one to watch.
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October 8th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
THANKS MONSTER !!!
While they are very valuable partners of ours, we do compete once in a while in the ATS space. I’m glad to see this action- even if its a one-off, its excellent ammo to use against them in an ATS sale. “Ms. customer, what other internet properties and services will Monster decide are not in your best interest ? ”
IMHO, Monster should have been reinventing themselves long ago as the TMS provider to the world. This move is pennies from above for those who would be harmed by that effort.
Now if their ATS were awesome, that might be another story….
October 10th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
It’s sad to see Monster taking this action against Wowjobs.ca, though it does appear Wowjobs was disregarding Monster’s norobots directive for some time. For our part at Eluta.ca, we’ve followed a practice of not indexing the large job boards (or any other site excluding robots) since our inception. It’s more difficult to index jobs directly from employers’ websites, but we believe this is where the real “value added” exists in our industry.
October 10th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Looks like Monster has done the same thing with Indeed as well….If you go to Indeed.com and do a location search on any keyword, say java, you’ll see that there are no recent results from Monster.com.
Has the big monster finally struck? Will careerbuilder be the next?
could you get us a word on this Joel?