Job Cross Pollination Duplication
The internet has been experiencing a massive amount of duplicate job content over the past couple of years. No question this content has been used to help job seekers find jobs, unfortunately it has also been used to leverage traffic using duplicative content, extract job seeker information and create many other issues not intended in the free flow of job information.
How did this start?
Quick history.. In 2002 iLogos Research (now Taleo Research) performed research which illustrated that less than 30% of Fortune 500 companies’ jobs were listed on the big 3 job boards. This research validated what most of the industry already knew and our Association had already acted upon. The predecessor to JobCentral, DirectEmployers Employment Search Engine, was created to index/spider 100% of the job content only from corporate career sites providing job seekers a clean path to ALL of the original jobs, not just a small chunk. This pure job content became very popular among job sites soon after DirectEmployers started providing a series of company xml feeds at no charge. The feeds were initiated to provide better content to job sites everywhere, moreover better market penetration for companies everywhere. Many job sites receiving this clean job content would then mix it with their own making it seem organic to their site (cross pollination).
The War for Content Heats Up!
The job search engine model seemed to be reinforced when Indeed and SimplyHired sprang onto the scene, and was fully validated when many new search engine-like sites, hungry for more and more job content, were soon to follow. Job boards needed to find a way to receive more content to keep job seekers returning, while exploring ways to game the young upstarts.
The War for Traffic Strives Through Duplication.
More job sites everywhere started mixing the corporate feeds with their very own content, cross pollination was happening everywhere. Job boards were also providing this mixed, now majorly duplicated content, to SimplyHired and Indeed. Why? If you provide thousands of jobs as traffic accelerators, through verticals,
you will no question receive heightened traffic results. But if you provide the cross pollinated content of hundreds of thousands of jobs your traffic could be accelerated 10 fold, or more. Why is this problematic? Duplication, moreover job seeker experience.
Where things went wrong.
Well you cannot expect everybody to play by the rules when there really weren’t any. Although you do expect site owners and designers to think about job seeker experience, and the use of content that didn’t truly belong to them. Reports of sites using interstitial ads to capture job seeker information, required registration for application, and then repackaging the exact same, now highly duplicated, content and submitting it to other job sites as their own has become an issue for job seekers, employers, and many of the verticals.
End result, it’s gotta stop.. Terms of Service to come..
Will the answer to this problem be a popular remedy? Magic 8 Ball says “Outlook, not so good“..
Comments(11)
Chad, I remember years ago when you started making your feed available and a number of job boards started claiming that they were the largest diversity boards on the Internet with 350,000 jobs available.
Many job boards would not exist at all without these feeds. But, I have recently come to realize as well that just as many job boards would not exist without the traffic obtained by redistributing the same feeds to multiple aggregators. It’s a clever way of building a business out of nothing. I have also been debating whether to post on this topic.
Recently I have had job board owners try to peddle large feeds as their own (probably came from you) and other job boards pushing the limits in a variety of ways on what constitutes a real job.
For years, my frustration with this murkiness in our marketplace has driven my search for the right path for my company.
Great topic!
– Eric
Thanks Eric..
If there are sites that are purely existing on our content in tandem with duplicate content traffic schemes then our new Terms of Service will provide a unique problem for their business model.
Terms of Service to follow very soon!
I.m looking forward to the next rounds. It’s good to have you back in the game, Chad.
I refer a lot of traffic to job central. In the early days my links were direct to employers through job central. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of redirects which really diminishes your value to the job seeker.
I’m glad to see you considering a return to direct to employer links on your site and RSS.
TheJobsGuy!
Thanks John!
Dear TheJobsGuy, we still send the job seeker directly to the job on the employer site, no changes. The redirect allows us to capture better information, through our Direct Traffic, analytics platform which is invisible during their direct travel to the job..
The only change is that employers and partners now receive better business intelligence on the supply side of labor market information.
Everyone wins!
Thanks for your comment – Chad
Chad why not cut through the crap and call it like it really is…the biggest cause of “cross pollination” and the massive amount of job duplication is caused by the job aggregators that call themselves “Search Engines” such as Simply Hired and Indeed, to name 2 of the largest. These parasites do nothing original on their own and their entire model consists of repackaging and capitalizing on other peoples leg work, and to add insult to injury, charging for it. And now they are crying foul because they are seeing others follow their lead? Let’s be the good guys and help police duplicate content so nobody takes a look at us!! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Was this massive problem here BEFORE the duplicators er aggregators came on the scene??
Apparently the traffic they receive makes what they do legitimate…. Obviously it is lucrative enough where even “Mr Holier then Though” Eric Shannon” is trying to game the system with his own cross pollination aggregator, I mean job search engine. So why not attack the problem at its root…the multitude of (as it is so kindly put) job aggregators aka job search engines who have by their very parasitical model created this mess. Oh and job seeker experience?? Try to have one with an aggregator, at least the job boards that backfill do care about the job seekers.
lol, well Jamie has a point! why is it okay for an aggregator to re-distribute jobs and not okay for the job boards?
imho, from an industry level viewpoint, redistribution of jobs is not the problem in itself. the most important issue is what happens when a job seeker clicks on the apply button. If the job seeker is taken to the employer’s website, the integrity of all parties is preserved. no foul has occurred. if on the other hand, a job seeker is taken from an aggregator to a job board and forced to register only to be taken to another job board or another aggregator, we are training job seekers to avoid every party in the chain… that is gaming the system and it can happen in any direction.
Some of the TOS of an aggregator like JC are designed to protect the employer and the job seeker, some are designed to protect the relationship between the aggregator and its job sources, and others are designed to protect its investment in infrastructure. At the end of the day, anyone that doesn’t like the TOS can make the same investments and do it their own way.
If you really want to go to the source of “the problem”, why stop at the aggregator? Why not blame job seekers?
Eric
The solution you propose seems to be the fairest and most logical way I have heard yet. I have no idea how many jobs Jobcentral has but they seem to be mostly corporate type jobs and are surely a drop in the bucket considering all of the other major job boards out there. I say that simply to point out that if there is to be some kind of Industry standard or “rule when there has been no rules” then it will take far more cooperation then just the jobs Jobcentral carries and distributes. Surely the display of a direct link to the original listing companies own choice of application would not only be the simplest but fairest way to address this issue. And “Simple” has the greatest chance of industry wide compliance especially since I could have sworn I have seen backfilled jobs duplicated in the past on Jobcentrals site.
I still suspect the greatest source of complaints is from the aggregators who had and/or have no problem participating in whole or in part (esp when they first started and needed the traffic) in “duplication & cross pollination”
What I had posted on Cheezhead addressing that was strangely enough only partially published which changed the context of my 5th point. Please see point 5 in it’s entirety below.
5) Shouldn’t the job aggregators, whose parasitical business model perpetuates and is the root cause of duplication, whom are now in the job board business and are not only claiming this plagiarized content as their own but attempting to duplicate and push traffic to their OWN sites through the same method of duplication they “abhor” and are so self righteously wringing their hands over, be held accountable? (see below)
Quote by The Chad “Although you do expect site owners and designers to think about job seeker experience, and the use of content that didn’t truly belong to them……….and then repackaging the exact same, now highly duplicated, content and submitting it to other job sites as their own has become an issue for job seekers, employers, and many of the verticals.”
The Verticals agenda in their own words.
Indeed
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Eric Shannon
“I believe that job seekers will only return if you’ve got jobs….In a nutshell, this is why we created JustJobs.com. So, if you are looking at how to supplement (backfill) the jobs on your board”
Simply Hired
Hosted Job Board Software
Job-a-matic lets publishers and bloggers instantly create a job board.
The data available through the Simply Hired API is derived from job listings aggregated from thousands of career websites
Add your Job-a-matic RSS feed to your RSS Feed (to Twitter) If you don’t have many directly posted jobs, you can expand your RSS feed to include backfill jobs, by appending bf-y/: Fine-tune the backfill jobs appearing in your tweets using the “Backfill” tab in Job-a-matic.
At the end of the day it seems that if “I” (insert your own name) am using duplicated or offering aggregated jobs directly from employers or any other source to be duplicated and it benefits me, my business or my site members then it’s A OK. If someone else is doing it or is complaining about it then they are in the wrong, (unless of course I have a relationship with them that is benefiting me)…or did I miss something?
One of the questions that still remains is who is NOT using duplication or cross pollination in some form or fashion as either duplicator or duplicatee or both ??? I think that list will be either VERY small or non-existent, all the more reason that preserving the relevance as you suggested and Chad stated “is the key” is really the most logical method
Finally please don’t get me started on jobseekers, while I am all for giving the job seeker the best most relevant experience, I often feel that the job seeker does not want to either work at getting a job or be inconvenienced by even a companys own application requirements or is it just that we are making un-needed decisions based on the 5% that are the complainers that will negatively affect the 95% of the job seekers that are perfectly happy with the status-quo?
there certainly are a lot of issues here. in the end, I don’t believe any industry standards will be decided or coordinated – competition will determine how all this shakes out. and the winners in competition, will be following Google’s and the job seekers rules whatever those may be.
Yeh this is inevitable – All advertisers will go for the main sites and then the smallers sites after that so there is always dups
Hey that is a history which no one discloses so easily but you have taken that step and its appreciable. This cross polination may not stop until someone initiates to show performances without such practices. we have seen many taking that initiatives but there is a lot more expected to overcome this cross pollination boom.
Oscar Hernandes
Research Analayst
Hirelabs, Inc.