Google’s Recent EMD Update…could blow your career site right off page one.

by Larry Engel

On September 27, 2012, Google^® announced yet another change to their search engine algorithm. And this time, the change could have far reaching implications for career site SEO.

Here’s why.

Companies usually don’t invest the time and money it takes to build search engine optimization (SEO) into their career site and job postings. They typically put up a few career-related pages and don’t build in a keyword, content or tagging strategy. Plus, the job postings and candidate application process is usually contracted out to an applicant tracking system (ATS).

Now a bit about Google’s recent EMD (exact match domain) update…

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam fighting team, announced in a September 28 tweet that “an upcoming Google algo change” (the EMD update) would, “reduce low-quality, ‘exact-match’ domains in search results.” That means websites with keyword-rich domains (e.g., http://www.mycompanyjobs.com or jobs.mycompany.com) will no longer be ranked higher in search results based on keywords embedded in their domain names.

Why the EMD update?

Because back when Google gave a lot of weight to domain names, webmasters would buy keyword-rich domains in order to rank high in search engine results pages. Think about it… If you sell shoes, why not choose a domain like AthleticShoes, DiscountShoes or CheapShoes. You’d get all the value of the keywords right there in the domain. There would effectively be no keyword value in choosing a domain name like Zappos.

In the past, if you chose a keyword-rich domain name, like mycompanyjobs.com or CheapShoesCareers.com, you didn’t have to do a lot of career site SEO to ensure a high search results ranking. You could “coast along” on the power of your company name and keywords alone. Well, that isn’t necessarily the case any longer. With Google’s new EMD update, the power of keywords in domains will be devalued and search result rankings will rely much more heavily on the strength of keyword-focused, high-quality content within the website.

As a result of the recent Google EMD update, and possibly a few minor updates since, you may have noticed your career site traffic start to slide a little (or a lot). Maybe your site isn’t showing up at the top of page one of Google SERPs (search engine result pages) any longer. The loss of rank may be due to the EMD update. SEOmoz, an online company that offers SEO monitoring software, as well as information regarding SEO and Google algorithm changes, recently announced that the EMD update led to a large-scale devaluation of sites and reduced the presence of EMDs in SERPs by over 10%.

What can you do to fix this problem?

One of two things…

You can spend more money on advertising and hope it reaches and influences the right audience and drives potential candidates to your career site and job postings.

You can develop an SEO strategy that pays attention to keywords, content and tagging. It will require some time, a small effort on your part and a little money, but the payoff in “free” traffic from Google will be huge.