Does Dot-Jobs Work?

PITTSBURGH, PA - Last week I was contacted by a company with a .Jobs TLD.  "TLD" stands for Top Level Domain, and you see them every day in the form of a .com, .net, .org, or dot-whatever.

Two years ago, the dot-jobs TLD was launched with great fanfare, partially as a way for corporate recruiting departments to maintain EZ-to-find career sites for their candidates -- but mostly as a way for these sites to jump to the front of the organic SERP's.

Sort of like a Special Access Pass at Disney World.

Essentially, dot-jobs was an SEO play marketed in the name of improving the jobseeker's search experience.  The pitch was that jobseekers who Google for "Merck jobs" (for example) would prefer to see the positions offered by Merck first -- and then see the "less relevant" job board and recruiter listings farther down the search result.  Dot-jobs conferred instant legitimacy.

For dot-jobs customers, the arduous SEO tasks of updating keyword rich content and back linking were, presumably, to be secondary concerns.  A standalone career site hosted on a dot-jobs domain was a trump card: dot-jobs beats dot-com, beats dot-net, beats dot-biz, and so on.  PPC costs would tumble, the argument went, as career sites floated to their "rightful place" at the top of the organic results.  Sweet victory!

It was a good idea.  But in practice, dot-jobs doesn't seem to be working out that way.  Here is the career site of the company who contacted me.  And here is the search I did for them on Google.  Where's the dot-jobs result?  M.I.A.

Now curious, I ran some other Google searches for dot-jobs career sites:

• Coca Cola Jobs - 97-122 CPD
• Merck Jobs - 4-6 CPD
• IKEA Jobs - 9-12 CPD
• Jim Beam Jobs - 0 CPD
• Remax Jobs - 0 CPD
• Estee Lauder Jobs - 6-8 CPD

Note:  These aren't just random companies.  They're companies being touted on the dot-jobs homepage as flagship customers.  Only Publix enjoys a top ranking with its dot-jobs domain.  Everybody else is trailing the job boards that dot-jobs was supposed to preempt.  Merck even has a testimonial on the dot-jobs homepage, yet Merck's dot-jobs page is fifth in the organic rankings (at least for my Google datacenter).  Ouch.

What gives?  Is a dot-jobs domain worth the $120/year investment?  That's more than twelve times what dot-com domains sell for.  Somebody enlighten me.
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Comments

[Ray Fassett]

Hello Harry, mostly a fairly accurate commentary but I would like to offer a few friendly amendments. First, the primary purpose of .jobs is for employer organizations to give their careers page its own name on the Internet, just as they do for their home page. Simply put, www.att.com is recognized as the longstanding name of the home page of AT&T Corp. It has, of course, home page content. With the existence of .jobs on the Internet, AT&T is able to provide their careers page with its own name to communicate to job seekers in the form of www.att.jobs.

The significance is content, not names. www.att.jobs is a URL that implies to job seekers a web site destination that contains employment content i.e. the careers page of AT&T Corp. It is a simple, inexpensive navigational tool for any employer in the world to use when investing into the advertising of its employment opportunities to job seekers.

For example, "apply online at www.att.jobs" is powerfully simple way to communicate to job seekers when placed by AT&T into an employment ad. So I wish to offer this correction to your comment that .jobs was launched "mostly as a way for these sites to jump to the front of the organic SERP's." And, to your point of fanfare, I've consistently tried to address this point over the past 24 months when I run across it. The primary purpose of .jobs is to provide a tool within the DNS utility for employers to name its careers page to communicate to job seekers. It is no more complicated than this.

SEO, on the other hand, is web site optimization and not doman name optimization. The ability to "jump ahead" in the organic search results requires proven SEO tactics applied to .jobs web sites - no different than for web sites in any other top level extension.

The question is, apples to apples, does applying SEO to web sites in the .jobs extension provide an advantage vs. doing exactly the same in other extensions? This is relevant question # 1. Relevant question # 2 is: Can employers capture high search results for generic job seeker search queries with a .jobs web site that has applied proven SEO tactics? I admit that these are 2 very important questions.

As the operator of .jobs on the Internet, we have no control over the methods a search provider uses to rank web sites to various user search queries. And, we have no control over the resources an employer chooses allocate to optimizing its careers page in the .jobs extension. Quite frankly, enough data has not yet materialized in the past 24 months to answer the above 2 relevant questions.

I can point to www.unionpacific.jobs as one textbook example of what to do with a .jobs domain name as its own web site on the Internet -including sound optimization strategies. It's no coincidence that they've been rewarded by Google with a top 5 search placement for very generic job seeker search queries of "train crew" or "railroad jobs". If Union Pacific can do it with its .jobs site web sextension, then any employer can accomplish same. But we can't control the pace for which an employer may choose to apply proven web site optimization resources to accomplish this particular end game. With each passing day, it evolves a little more across the world - and at a pace that far exceeds the early days of .com.

When optimization resources are applied in greater frequency across a broader base, we will then be able to draw conclusions as to whether .jobs web sites are able to jump to the front of the organic SERP's, all else remaining equal. It's part of the standardization process that will take time to achieve. I don't shy away from the fact that the opportunity exists with the search providers as a direct result of the existence of the .jobs extension on the Internet. In fact there is no question in my mind about the opportunity. But I do shy away from conclusions that a .jobs domain name registration is going to, in and of itself, vault a careers page web site to the forefront of search rankings. I hope you see the difference and find this explanation helpful.

Have a happy and safe New Year.

Ray Fassett
.JOBS
1-216-426-1500 Ext 3

[Harry Joiner]

Hi Ray,

Points very well taken. Agreed.

Still, I do recall one well respected HRSEO blogger saying (in 2006) that having the dot-jobs domain and URL categorized in the same class as .edu, .gov, etc. in search engines' eyes should go a long way in helping .jobs domain holders, which are restricted to direct employers, get a leg-up on ranking well for targeted searches in comparison to .coms and sites of their ilk.

Yet this "leg-up" is not as big as one might have envisioned.

Harry

[Ray Fassett]

When employers take the approach of having their .jobs web site perform on the Internet like registrants in .edu and .gov do, then the search providers will react as they have already shown to do in these far more mature extensions i.e. ahead of .com in vertical user search queries. There are already examples of this. But .jobs is no where near ready to trumpet this benefit to the market place, and you will notice that we have been careful not to do so. Even at "12 times the cost of dot-com domains" (as is .edu and .gov) we are confident with the value equation to employers at this point in the .jobs life cycle as I have stated it to be.

I appreciate the conversation, Harry.

Ray Fassett