.Jobs changes could be done without the .jobs TLD.
Over the weekend I read The Washington Post’s article about the liberalization of the .jobs TLD and what this means for companies such as Monster and Career Builder.
Last week 40,000 .jobs web sites went live for just about every major profession (e.g. nurse.jobs) and city (e.g. austin.jobs). Companies that are members of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) can post jobs for free on the job boards, which are basically auto generated job sites.
Those quoted in the article made it out as if this is ground breaking because of the top level domain name .jobs and it couldn’t be achieved any other way. But like many ideas for new TLDs, what’s happening here could have just as easily happened on a standard .com domain name. In fact, it may have been easier.
Are you telling me members of SHRM couldn’t have just created a .com web site and done the same thing (free listings)? If the radical thing is that it’s backed by large companies and they can post wanted ads for free, that’s nothing you need .jobs for.
Is there search value to nurse.jobs? No more than nurse.jobs.com or even jobs.com/nurse. In fact, I think nurse.jobs is worse because search engine optimization and linking will be required for each .jobs domain. People will also have to understand that they can end a URL with .jobs. If you just focus on one domain or brand you can get better rankings.
Ironically, the biggest short term winner behind this change is one of the companies that is fighting it: Monster. Monster owns jobs.com, which is sure to get a lot of traffic to URLs such as nurse.jobs.com and austin.jobs.com if .jobs takes off.
Assuming that the market for generic “job” Web sites can support at least two competitors. Wouldn’t dot-jobs increase competition? Is that bad?
Increased competition isn’t bad. My point is that members of SHRM could have more easily just set up their own competing web site. A TLD isn’t required to do this.
the difference is control by corporations and not individuals.now the corps can write their own ticket and have control of the suffix.
I agree with you, Andrew.
At the heart of this matter is the question “Does the actions of Employ Media , the company behind .jobs, violate the .jobs charter with Icann?”.
There is nothing wrong with competition but there is lot to consider if this company is openly violating the rules of their charter for running the .jobs TLD.
I would refer you to this link to a recent article at CollegeRecruiter.com which discusses the claims of the .Jobs Charter Compliance Coalition. It also includes a rebuttal letter from the direct Employers Association who is developing the sites for the Dot Jobs TLD:
http://collegerecruiter.com/profiles/blogs/direct-employers-association
As it stands now it appears to me that Employ Media and Direct Employers Association are in violation of the .Jobs charter. Iif they are insistant on going forward they need to complete the steps necessary to get the charter amended to allow this new use of the TLD.
@ CT Kirkpatrick – that is certainly a good question and one that I don’t seek to address here. What I’m addressing is that the WP article addresses competition as if the opening up of .jobs is the only way to create that competition.
@ Andrew Allemann
Thank you for the reply Andrew. I’m sorry I misunderstood your post.
Does this mean new TLDs would not have an unfair advantage in SEO if allowed to “wild card” develop sites based on the top search terms and/or all search terms?
I am just trying to understand SEO so maybe I have some misperceptions as to the ranking of TLDs by search engines. Doesn’t .jobs carry similar weight in ranking as dot com, net, org, biz etc?
@ C.T. Kirkpatrick – I don’t think anyone knows for use if .ntld will carry the same weight as .com. But the problem here is they’ve created 40k different sites, each with very light and basic content. They’ll have to SEO each and every one of them, just like you would 40k separate .com domain names. If it were just one site then all of the links would be concentrated to the si9te.
Andrew – So what are some better alternative competitors to jobs.com than dot-jobs?
@ Alex – it could be anything. Two of the biggest players have names that have nothing to do with the word “jobs” — CareerBuilder.com an Monster.
the real benefit is not SEO it’s branding or rather will be branding if and when (and its a big if and long when) new gTLDs become ubiquitous.
Then ICANN has managed to award each contracted party a huge branding advantage over all their competitors who are forced to compete from the second level.
Same problem with .xxx – Why should one ICANN contracted party be allowed to control that vertical?
Same problem with .search – What happens if Microsoft secures .search? google.search?
What happens if Rupert buys the company that secures .news?
It’s great if you are the company that controls the vertical its not so great if its one of your competitors.
Trademark Law doesn’t allow such advantage and for good reason.
Google has said repeatedly and for the record that it does not differentiate between pages based upon their domain extensions. Many believed for years that Google favored .mil, .gov, .edu, and other such “trusted” domains but they put that to rest several years ago when they said that the reasons those domains tend to come up higher is because they tend to be older, have more content, have better content, have more in-links, etc. than the average .com, .net, etc. site.
My belief is that Google, Bing, and the others will see the .JOBS sites for what they are likely to be: cookie cutter sites. If you create 100,000 almost identical variations of your site, Google will not list your site 100,000 times. You’ll get one listing…maybe. If they think you’re spamming them, you won’t even get that. I don’t think that .JOBS will be banned for spamming the search engines, but I also don’t think that they’re going to see 100,000 top listings like their business model seems to expect.
it would have been better if it is just .job insted of .jobs. it’s crazy to type such a long world. i thing .jobs gonna face the same fate as .travel.