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The beginning of the year is usually a busy time for job board launches. Here are some of the most recent ones I’ve seen with a little bit of commentary.

JOBCRANK – “JobCrank.com, is a national job board that specializes in helping recruiters, small businesses, and individuals connect with future employees or freelance contractors. JobCrank.com is the one of the web’s leaders in delivering job opportunities through social networking partners and hundreds of job boards nationwide.

Companies and recruiters can post their jobs at a very low rate of $4.99 per basic job listing. Companies and recruiters also have the ability to increase their job listings exposure by selecting from one of three job listing packages.”

MY TAKE: National job boards like this will never make it. They’ll never overtake Monster or CB. May be able to squeek out some revenue from the Indeed backfill but not much else. Good price point though…$4.99 per job.

ACCOUNTANCY AGE JOBS – “Leading business-to-business publisher Incisive Media has announced a new jobsite for Accountancy Age Jobs. The move is part of a newly formed partnership with AccountingWeb to provide a recruitment solution with a collective reach to 385,000 individuals in the accountancy market.

Accountancy Age Jobs has adopted the latest version of the award winning Madgex Job Board Platform. The jobsite includes Madgex’s next generation CV database, CV Search and Match, an intelligent search technology which matches recruiter needs with the most relevant candidates. The two new sites will offer recruiters increased reach to accountancy professionals.”

MY TAKE: A global job board powered by Mdgex one of the nicer designed software providers. Love the credit card images on the home page! Says we are open for business. Too many logos on the home page, looks a little cluttered.

EXPATHIRING – “ExpatHiring.com unveiled a new online niche job board this week, focusing solely on the international employment of expats and bilingual professionals around the world. ExpatHiring.com is more than simply a job board for expat jobs – it is a whole new experience in expatriate recruitment. The website aims to provide expat job seekers with everything needed to help find genuine international job opportunities and make the subsequent relocation overseas much easier.”

MY TAKE: Well designed user interface with nice graphics. Not sure how big of a niche this is but looks like a strong contender. Really impressed with the design

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For the past 2 years I have been riding a nice SEO wave with many of my Jobamatic sites. They have always been great traffic magnets. However recent changes taking place within the google algorithm may be causing sites powered by Jobamatic to lose ranking.

Here’s a graph of my Burlington VT jobs site from the last 4 weeks. Notice the downward trend!

So it appears that the “duplicate content” within this job board software is no longer worthy in Google’s eyes. I have noticed this hasnt affected basic searches…for instance I still rank well for the term ‘burlington vt jobs‘ … but my ‘long tail’ terms has subsided a lot. Bummer dude.

This is going to make it harder for earning on backfill and adsense. It may make better sense to move to a different software provider.

Reference: here are some links to read about the google changes.

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/internet/20110131-google-changes-search-algorithm-to-favour-original-content-as-crowd-sourced-content-explodes.html

http://www.searchnewz.com/topstory/news/sn-2-20110131GooglesNewContentFarmAlgorithmInAction.html

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Every job board should have a reason to post jobs on it. For niche and regional sites that reason is self explanatory. The rise of local and niche job boards over the past 5 years is no accident. They work, and that reason is all about the focus and quality results they deliver. The reason to post on your site should be clearly expressed to potential clients on your home page and reinforced throughout the employer sections of the site.

Here are some reasons why niche job boards are popular:

Forrester Research: “Local Sites Matter. Geography is more important to job seekers than industry focused sites. Monster.com is the most popular career site, but local sites place second and fourth in usage.”

Weddles.com: “These (local) Web-sites offer focused recruiting opportunities within specific geographic areas. Some concentrate on unique metropolitan districts while others have a broader, regional span. In either case, they enable you to reach large concentrations of prospective candidates for positions where relocation support is not available or a local background is important to successful job performance.”

CollegeRecruiter.com: There are several benefits to using niche/local job boards. First, little to no advertising money is wasted targeting unqualified candidates. Because the high profile, general boards target all candidates, the result is that the vast majority of the candidates using those boards will not be interested in the position posted by the employer because it falls outside of their career path, geographic preference or skill level.

By posting the position to the appropriate niche board, virtually all of the candidates using that niche/local board will be qualified for the position. As a result, even if the site has a small fraction of the traffic of the high profile, general board, the number of qualified candidates using the niche board tends to be higher. Second, the cost to post a position to a niche/local board is usually far less.

When listing the benefits of your site to employers, use quotes like this to give the recruiter “piece of mind” that their ad dollar will not go to waste. Remind them constantly that your site is not like Monster or the other big guys. Your site is more targeted, therefore they’ll get more qualified candidates.

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Got an email from a reader who asks: Is the job board business lucrative?