How would you feel if Google started ranking sites in their organic search results based on whether they were advertisers on AdWords or not? And not just because you thought they were doing it, but because they were actively selling it to prospects and clients?
Well, regardless of how you’d feel personally, the search community would be up in arms. Everyday consumers of Google might too. Because, aside from arguably being evil, you arguably cease being a search engine and jump into the directory category. Or, in the online employment space, you cease being a vertical job search engine and jump into the job board category.
This is apparently where Simply Hired is going.
A reliable source informs us, “They call it an ‘advertising boost.’ Basically, you’ll get more organic traffic if you spend money with them. I guess they sort advertisers to the top of organic results first, but they don’t actually switch relevancy, so the jobseeker is still getting what they searched for.”
Oh good, at least my searches for “sales” won’t bring up “nursing” opportunities. In a time when dollars are precious, desperation rules the day and selling your search algorithm to the highest bidder seems like a great money-maker and differentiator from the competition. But is it the best long-term decision?
“Our Account Management team has always worked with our advertisers to apply best practices and engineering resources as needed to optimize their job content,” said Simply Hired’s Katya White, senior marketing communications manager, when asked if Simply Hired was selling organic placement. “This is based on our quality guidelines and we’ve consistently seen this lead to better performance overall.”
Huh?
“Juju does not manipulate organic relevance scores in favor of sponsors in any way, under any circumstances,” said Brendan Cruickshank, VP of sales for the company. “We believe that users’ ability to find relevant jobs is paramount.”
Juju isn’t entirely in the clear though. “However, in the interest of fair disclosure, if we have the same job from multiple sources, we will de-duplicate in favor of sponsors,” added Cruickshank. “We believe that’s reasonable, and preserves the integrity of the user experience, because there is no difference in the relevance scores between the alternatives available for display.”
Search leader Indeed has also been known to treat advertisers preferentially when compared to non-paying constituents. Stories of jobs being dropped from the index or being lost in the queue after canceling ad accounts are fairly commonplace. “These guys are like the mob,” one job board owner enjoys saying every time I chat with him about the industry.
Of course, the bigger question is, Does anyone really care? The same source that told us about Simply Hired also said, “I don’t really have an issue with it – if they’re giving paying customers preferential treatment over non-paying customers, it’s probably good customer service and an incentive to spend money with them.”
Maybe so. And maybe it keeps the lights on. But it sure seems like a slippery slope.
Popularity: 8% [?]
July 16th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Joel- This is a rediculous practice. You slam the job boards, but even they don’t manipulate organic results based on spend (although they could). This is similar to another practice you have not exposed (one that also smacks of desperation)- JobFox allowing paying consumers to get introductions to companies. Either you’re a matching service or you’re not. It’s like claiming to be eHarmony, but then saying to guys “if you think she’s really hot, I can intyroduce you for a fee.” So much for matching.
July 16th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
This is flyer of juju.com, absolutely.
July 16th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Yeah…like Joel Cheesman and Brendan Cruickshank are the picture of upstanding businessmen. One guy runs the TMZ of the recruitment industry and the other guy worked at Indeed, and then screwed them for Juju. No reason to believe their company isn’t manipulating results…what does he have to gain by lying about it?
July 16th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Yahoo! does that too. Their “Paid Inclusion” program allows companies to pay to be included in results. In Yahoo’s explanation of the program it says that it doesn’t necessarily give you a boost, but I’ve never seen it not make a significant difference.
July 16th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
This sounds like a Juju paid advertisement to me.
Btw…Yahoo Search allows clients to paid to boost their organic results for $0.20/click. They call it optimization and allow you to alter the copy of the listing, but basically its paying for more organics.
Google uses it in its relevancy algorithm and calls it “brand score” or some other BS name.
EVERYONE does it…don’t be naive. Juju included…I don’t care what the aggregator jumper says. Just because Joel makes it sound like a sensational scoop doesn’t mean it is.
July 17th, 2009 at 9:34 am
I don’t think this is that scandalous.
Most job board users will enter 2 or 3 words when searching. When someone types “electrician, new york” you’re going to get a whole stack of jobs. You have to rank them on something. The problem is that the kind of “relevance” that Google might use doesn’t apply here. Unless you think a job found 1 hour ago is more “relevant” than a job found 2 hours ago.
You could argue that the paid advertisement is more likely to be an actual job rather than spam or SEO crap. If that’s the case, then SimplyHired is helping.
By the way, I have no doubt that Indeed does the same thing.
As for juju, they don’t seem to have any traffic, do they? So who cares what they do?
July 17th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
There’s no question that whatever the search engines are doing yields a better job search for the job seeker than job boards. Job boards return lists based on very basic search algorithms. Indeed and SimplyHired (possibly JuJu) return the best targeted matches for the job seeker. Their core technology is search, not aggregation.
Why all the debate? can’t we just run a basic test and use some common sense? Let’s test a broad search in a big market.
Search – What:Marketing Manager Where:New York, NY
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=marketing+manager&l=New+York%2C+NY – 6,703 results in 0.58 seconds
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/q-marketing+manager/l-New+York%2C+NY – 3,974 in 3.14 seconds
http://www.job-search-engine.com/jobs?k=marketing+manager&l=New+York%2C+NY – 2,618 in 2.41 seconds
I don’t even know how to go about determining who has a better organic result. Indeed and SimplyHired both show a good mix of employers and job boards and the relevance seems to be good for both. I can see though, that there doesn’t appear to be any over-population of the organic results with any jobs from the companies that appear in the sponsored results. In fact, on Indeed and SimplyHired, they don’t appear in the organic at all. There are mostly new jobs in the results, and jobs loaded with the keyword match. If there is organic favoritism going on here, I’m not sure how you could tell.
JuJu is all job board results. This make sense, as their volume is also much lower.
The sponsored results are what’s interesting. Again, JuJu is all job boards – I could only find 5 different boards as I paginated 20 pages back. Unexpectedly, the same is true for SimplyHired. The first page is TheLadders and KForce, followed by a WorkInRetail job, and then just more TheLadders, on and on..
On Indeed, there is a good mix of employers and job boards, and the results come up lightning fast. Not sure what this means – either Indeed has a better search algorithm, or more advertisers?
It would be great if posts like this came out with examples to back up the claims.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:26 am
What is the big deal with juju all of a sudden? They are a stinking JOKE. I tried to contact them once and it took 2 weeks for them to respond. No company name, no phone no address. Who are they and why and what are they trying to hide? Its no wonder their traffic has gone down this year while everyone elses has gone up.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
@ Anonymous (the last one…) – come on, whoever this is knows who juju is. Can we get some legitimate structured argument going here or is everyone just going to keep bashing each other? If you’re in the industry you know who juju is and what they’re after.
Are there any readers of this blog who want to participate with in the actual argument going on here? Does anyone aside form Inspector have anything meaningful to add?
July 20th, 2009 at 10:30 am
@ Anyone (come on, whoever this is knows who juju is)
Then who are they? If I knew then why would I ask and if you know why cant tou give an answer?
I Know (as most do) just as much about Juju as I do http://www.thejobfool.com which is NOTHING except that they both scrape jobs from the web
July 20th, 2009 at 11:48 am
@Anyone?
Is this juju.com? Becuause I’m in the industry and I’ve never heard about juju except on this board. Their traffic shows up as too low to measure on Alexa, and Quantcast. Compete.com says they are getting about 15,000 visitors a month, which is as close to nothing as you can get and still have a website.
I don’t think their customer service matters if they have no inventory to sell. What is the reason for them to be in business? Do we really need more aggregators?
July 20th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
@Blake Carrington – I don’t beleive you… Seems like a shady, sloppy attack… BUT, if this is really what you think and you’re in the industry, and have never heard of JuJu, you’re company needs to invest in some industry education on your behalf – http://siteanalytics.compete.com/www.job-search-engine.com/?src=3ss. Have you been to any trade shows lately – if so stop by their booth and they’ll explain their existence to you.
Wisely, JuJu resides under the domain name job-search-engine.com. Based on what compete reports, they most likely have just over 1 million unique visitors a month. Still think they don’t have any inventory? Just run a search on their site and you will see their advertisers. It’s pretty simple stuff. They’re selling to job boards. So – there’s an obvious reason they’re in business – they’re providing inexpensive traffic to job boards. How is this all confusing?
I don’t understand why readers of this blog are just slamming JuJu, but unwilling to engage and any meaningful discussion. Can anyone show evidence of organic favoritism on any of these sites, or is this article baseless?
July 21st, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I would say juju is getting slammed because they hide….. the kind of sites honest people worry about. Why should we need to go to SHRM to find out about them? A simple “about” section and roster of executives and heaven forbid but a phone number would go a long ways into helping them grow into an accountable reputable company.. Send them a contact form…they wont even answer with a name. They will ask you for money though.
@ inspecting 1 million uniques??? Why are you trying to pump them by “misrepresenting” the facts
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/job-search-engine.com+indeed.com+simplyhired.com/ They are not only a long way from your stated numbers but their traffic is down double digits this year which would indicate that the public is “bashing” them with their mouse and driving reputable open companies like Indeed and SH to triple digit increases. If the public cant trust Wall Street not to scam them why would they want to trust some website that wont properly identify themselves.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:10 pm
@Tommy Johnson – OK, maybe less than 1 million uniques. But most certainly more than the 755k Compete shows. Compete consistently underestimates unique visitor counts for sites by 15-20%. If you run a site, or work for a company, perhaps they can share the actuals with you as compared to how Compete measures site site. At any rate, 755k or 900k, they are still able to sustain clients.
So – enough about JuJu – they don’t have a contact form, don’t respond to people, so I guess that means the 1 million visits to their site are worthless. OK, let’s move on.
It would be interesting if the author of this article jumped into the discussion. So Cheesman, did SimplyHired admit to boosting organic traffic for advertisers? All we got was an unclear quote and a “Huh?”.
July 22nd, 2009 at 2:49 pm
My name speaks for itself.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
What trashy participants on this blog… There’s someone here trying to make a point – “Inspecting”. Why isn’t anyone talking about anything real. Isn’t this the forum for it? Isn’t this blog’s purpose to spark debate from people in the industry? Why all the trash?
will someone just respond to this with In the indsutry = Juju ?
Yuck – Find some new readers.