Why doesn’t Google take over the aggregators?
Posted on November 11, 2008
Filed Under Career Site SEO, HR SEO | 2 Comments
In a recent post from, the Talent Buzz, Kris Rzepkowski, commented on why Google doesn’t just take over the aggregators.
In my opinion, there are a couple of big reasons Google isn’t in the game, and might not be any time soon:
1. There isn’t enough money in our sector to worry about it. Yes, there is money, but it might not be that high of a priority in the over all Search Marketing Industry.
2. Google can’t easily get the jobs out of the career sites, mostly due to the ATS systems. Most ATS systems have the job content, and that content is not optimized for the web.
3. This is the biggest myth in HR SEO, individual job postings will almost NEVER get enough significant job seeker traffic to make a hire.
This is for several reasons:
First of all, Google ranks pages primarily based on an algorithm that gives higher search engine rankings based on several factors, including the “authority” of the page, and several “on-page” optimization factors. One of the key criteria to “authority”, is the number of quality backlinks to that web page.
Individual job postings don’t have enough backlinks to be considered authorities, and therefore don’t get highly ranked in the search engines.
Another major factor is the number of candidates searching for that specific job posting on the web. Yes, there are over 100 Million “job” related searches performed each month on Google, but the number of searches for a “truck driver in los angeles”, may have only 20 searches in a month. Even if you did get all of the 20 searches to click on your web page, which isn’t likely, you still only had 20 people view the site. Then, you still have to get them to apply to the job… another issue.
A good HR SEO strategy uses Keyword Research to find the right keywords to optimize for, and then builds web pages that will bring in candidates based on the keywords that candidates are already using to find jobs.
In this model, the individual job postings are NOT the primary factors on the web pages, instead, the keywords uncovered in the research are.
Comments
2 Responses to “Why doesn’t Google take over the aggregators?”
Leave a Reply
In my opinion Google is taking a wait and see approach in this market. With the economic conditions they way they are Google can hold off for 24 to 36 months and see how it shakes out. I liken it to Yahoo’s purchase of HotJobs. Yahoo was the power player at the time, they sat back watch the market mature and made there move.
This represents an excellent opportunity for a smaller company to step in and build significant market share, setting themselves up for a possible acquisition.
1. I agree that there’s not a lot of money in the recruitment ad sector as there may be in others. Nonetheless, if each corporation and staffing firm were paying even $100,000 in “Google AdWords for Jobs” I’d bet Google would take it.
2. The fact that Google can’t dive into ATS’s seems to be related to #1, they just haven’t seen the need to invest in it. If Opti-Jobs and Jobs2Web and others can “scrape” an ATS to create portals, then certainly Google could set up an easy protocol to do so, and completely bypass the Indeeds of the world.
3. I agree in the short term that the best SEO will be creating keyword optimized gateway pages that pull together groups of jobs matching typical searches.
However, I still don’t think that’s the only way. If Google can drive enough traffic to individual products for sales purposes in Google Product Search, then what’s to stop a Google Job Search vertical that drives way more traffic to individual job ads? To your point – it’s simply the money. Other sectors are more profitable. However, as this economy turns and they continue to watch increased job related searches, maybe they’ll turn to our sector???