.Jobs Changes Are Not an Example of the Power of Fresh Top Level Domains

.Jobs changes could be done without the .jobs TLD.

Over the weekend I read The Washington Post’s article regarding the liberalization of the .jobs TLD and what this means for firms such as Monster and Career Builder.

The prior week 40,000 .jobs web sites went live for just regarding every major profession (e.g. nurse.jobs) and city (e.g. austin.jobs). Firms 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 since of the top level domain name .jobs and it couldn’t be achieved any other way. But like many ideas for fresh 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 sizable firms 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 since 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 firms 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.