Alexa rankings of top Jobsites

If you are a regular visitor to onrec.com you will know that we track Alexa a rankings with great interest particularly as we do rather well (21,977 as of today).

We are not alone Brian Krueger, President, CollegeGrad.com Inc. has put the together a website to make monitoring the top players in the industry easier and compiles a monthly report:


Here are the top job sites notes of the month:

The most important overall statistic is that almost all of the major sites were trending upward in their Alexa rankings. 73 sites (80%) were up overall, 16 (18%) were down and 2 (2%) were unchanged. Why? Was it great traffic? Super Bowl ads? A newly robust job market? The simple answer is in understanding how the Alexa rankings work: they use a three-month trend line of the relative rankings of all sites on the Internet. And as of April, the trailing December numbers were replaced with March numbers in the three month trend line. Not that the December numbers were in any way down for most job sites, just that they were lower relative to the sites which had any Christmas sales impact. Those B2C sites now typically have lower rankings and the job search sites are relatively higher.

That being said, I donít want to simply dismiss this increase, which is significant. Whatís most significant is that almost all of the top sites increased: the top 18 general sites ALL showed an increase, the top 8 college sites ALL showed an increase, 4 of the top 5 executive sites showed an increase, the top 7 niche sites ALL showed an increase, and ALL of the diversity (3) and international (13) sites showed an increase. Almost all of the decreases (which were few) were at or near the bottom of each list. So what does this say? That almost all major job sites are showing a strong trend line increase in overall Internet traffic share. This is even more significant when you consider the maturity of the job site market, which has been around since the very early days of the Internet.

So did Monster really get dethroned? Yes, it did in two different categoriesóbut they are still #1 overall. SEEK replaced Monster UK as the #1 International Site and CareerJournal.com took over the #2 position in the Executive Sites category from Chief Monster. Yet itís also important to note that Monster increased their ranking for each of their sites. But just not as fast as some of the other sites. And the flagship Monster.com site is now a solid Top 100 Internet Property overall (ranked #93).

An interesting (yet sad) side note: two boards were dropped from the listing this month for attempting to manipulate the Alexa data. In one case, their ranking tripled in one month and in the other case it quadrupled in one month. Given that the ranking is a three month trend line, you can see that it requires about a tenfold increase in traffic in one month to make this come about. Were the increases real? No. In fact, whatís interesting about both is that they spiked upward on the exact same day: the day that John Sumser published the results of our last Alexa survey. And neither of these sites were mentioned in Johnís article, nor were they listed in the top ten (but apparently they wanted to be). Sad. Very sad.

Overall, a great month of increases for the top job sites!

Brian Krueger, President, CollegeGrad.com Inc.


The information on jobsites and their ranking on Alexa can be found here