A big thanks to the Google team for cleaning house. Do a Google search for jobs, and you will see a remarkable difference compared with results from two years ago. This helps everyone doing honest work in the job search business!

I spend the first 45 minutes of every day reading blogs and forum. It's healthy to read lots of different viewpoints. But, it's also easy to learn the wrong things from the "experts". Years ago, there seemed to be a consensus that link partnerships no longer worked.

As a result, we abandoned the practice. The real lesson we should have learned was this -- reciprocal links became less effective, but so what? They were still a valuable tool. In reality, everything has become less effective than it was back in the salad days. So in fact, relative to all the other choices we have, reciprocal linking should have held its relative priority for us in the lineup of marketing tools.

More than a year ago, I wrote about the high level (as much as 50%) of deceptive advertising in Google's sponsored search results (AdWords) for the search keyword 'jobs'. I hoped Google would clean up the spam...

And why should I care about this?

As many job board people know, big changes have been occurring in the Google search results over the past couple of months. Yesterday Google announced improved search refinements -

"Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page)."

Here's an example that I noticed a few days before the announcement - try a search for 'job boards' and you'll see this unusual result:

Why is the .US country code domain extension so undeveloped in comparison with other country's cc tlds? Until recently I assumed it was a natural bias resulting from America being the pioneer in .com.  But, I've learned that Google's search algorithms also cripple the .us domain.  

Google Trends is showing keyword searches with the keyword 'jobs' are up significantly this year starting midway through the year when typically they should be declining based on historical patterns. News reference volume is also up significantly.

See for yourself.

How do you launch a new job board or website? Once it is designed and built, you have a problem -- no links, no Google PR rank, and no visitors. Even with the best content, traffic does not happen magically. You have a chicken and egg problem -- no one will take you seriously, until other people take you seriously. And launching a job board is more complicated than most other ventures. Joel Spolsky explains why in How Hard Could it Be?:

In a fascinating article about branding versus SEO, search engine watch put into words very nicely a feeling that has been tugging at me for a long time:

Before-

In 1991, if you wanted to buy a portable compact disc player, you had to know:

1. What you wanted to buy (portable compact disc player) R.I.P. Branding
2. What brand you wanted to buy (Sony)
3. What product you wanted to buy (Discman)
4. What store to buy it at (The Wiz)
5. Where to find that store (Menlo Park Mall)

Aside from Step 1, every other piece of information came to you from branding.

After-

Earlier this year I commented on Matt Cutts SEO hacker prediction:

"Would you notice if a strange link appeared somewhere inside your website? How long would it take you to see it? Hacking is a reality for everyone in our industry at one time or another but this is one that could be difficult to detect."

Well, his prediction was right on target. But if this happens to you, you will not notice any of the links the hackers install on your website -- they are invisible. Our Drupal sites were hit a couple weeks ago and it has cost us plenty of time and energy to disinfect these websites.

Here is how it was done: