Does MySpace jobs have better SEO juice than CareerBuilder?

6 Comments

Comment by Willy Franzen on June 3, 2008 at 5:59pm

I've been seeing MySpace Jobs results come up for all kinds of job related searches- often when the page has no relevant content. I thought Google didn't like to index search results, but apparently they do for MySpace Jobs. Typically the results are low quality and have no business ranking where they do.

By the way, my search results for this query are totally different. I made sure to turn off Personalized Search Results.

I get

1. Indeed
2 and 3. Walgreens
4. Jobs.com
5. Jobs in Pods
6 and 7. Career Builder
8. Simply Hired
9. MySpace
10. AllPharacyJobs.com

Comment by Chris Russell on June 3, 2008 at 6:11pm

Hmmm, sometines i get Jobbankusa as Number 1

Comment by Jonathan Duarte on June 4, 2008 at 10:18am

Hi Chris,
I'm getting the following:
1& 2. Walgreens
3&4 Indeed
5. Walgreens Outreach
6. Jobs.com
7 CareerBuilder
8 Myspace
9. JobSearch Engine
10. SimplyHired.

I think what you are seeing is a typical response from Google for Social Networking Sites. It seems that over the last 18 months, Google has been providing Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites with a "Recency and Relevancy" boost that seems to be short-lived. Some of the SEO expert put it this way. Google is crawling MySpace and all the Web 2.0 properties, including Blogs, much faster, and more often than other sites. This is due to several reasons, including Pinging as well as Google give MySpace some sort of "Authority".

So, if Google finds some news, or new page, on MySpace, it gives the content a short-lived "relevancy" bump. There isn't much being said about how this whole thing works, but there are lots of examples of it.

Another example you might see is Podcasts and Videos.
They will get immediate boosts with SEO Love from Google, but after even a couple of hours or days, they aren't "recent" anymore, and go to the back of the line.

Over time, the standard SEO rules apply.
1. Know your keywords.
2. Have Excellent On-Page Factors.
3. Become an Authority, with powerful and authoritative Backlinks.

Comment by Willy Franzen on June 4, 2008 at 11:28am

I'm now seeing similar results to what Jonathan is seeing.

Jonathan - I'm not sure what you're saying is relevant to the MySpace Jobs phenomenon. MySpace's Jobs pages don't have much to do with social networking from what I can tell. There's not really any fresh content that I can see that would give them a relevancy boost (although the list of jobs is likely constantly updated). I think the changes we've seen here are just normal shuffling in the SERPs. It happens all the time.

The thing that MySpace does have is an amazing amount of "link juice" that enables them to get a ton of pages indexed and ranking well. Every time that someone links to a MySpace page, that's helping their rankings for the Jobs pages too.

Comment by Rebecca on June 4, 2008 at 4:37pm

The linkup from MySpace to Google makes sense. But speaking of MySpace- how sucessful do you feel an employer would be posting there? Does anyone have any insight?

Comment by Jonathan Duarte on June 17, 2008 at 2:15pm

Hey there Will,
Yes, as you mention, the "Link Juice" is probably what is causing the "normal Shuffling of the SERPs". Google is looking for Relevant and Recent content. They track this through not only their spiders, but through a process called Pinging. Every time a new myspace comment is made, or linked to, in many cases (but maybe not all), myspace might be sending a Ping to google. Google then comes back to the page from where the ping originated, and indexes the page.
One of the most common thoughts seems to be that google acknowledges this link as "recent", and the connecting link at somewhat "relevant". However, after some sort of grace period, if the page that created the topic and the resulting link page are not linked to or otherwise mentioned, than that page's "recency" and "relevancy" rankings that put them on top of the SERP, are stripped.

You can see this theory work itself out with a lot of the video, web 2.0, and social bookmarking sites. They all ping google. Many of them give better "link juice" to a site, but all come to the save result... no lasting SEO results, unless the page has authority back links.
JD

Add a Comment