One of the best and worst things about trying to make your company visible on the Web is the illusionary nature of the medium. The Web can make an organization look big or small, successful or unsuccessful largely through positioning in search results. We became curious about which Human Resources sites were really succeeding in achieving high traffic and search engine credibility--not just giving the appearance of success.
We created a list of 130 HR sites from HRMarketer.com, based on our categories of interest: general HR, training and development, recruitment industry, management and leadership, wellness, work-family balance, and compensation.
Then we applied two well known measures of search engine success: Google page rank and Alexa traffic statistics to the list. These measures don't predict the quality of the editorial material, but they tell us something about how search engines view the site. Here's some insight into HR sites that are succeeding in the Web game.
Top Sites
Four general HR sites stand out. The most successful, by the measurements listed above, is the Society for Human Resource Management Online. It has three relatively close followers: the HR portal site, HR.com, and two sites published by BLR, the Best Practices in HR newsletter and HR.BLR.com compliance tools.
In the world of training and development, ASTD's T+D Magazine site is the hands-down winner. Another busy site in this category is eLearning Guild .
Among work-family sites, Sloan Work and Family Research Network from Boston College makes a very credible showing, followed by Penn State's WorkFam Notes.
Among recruiting industry sites, Electronic Recruiting Exchange seems to be garnering a lot of traffic, followed by Recruiting.com. (Note: Monster.com isn't exclusively for industry members, but it is obviously a large and successful recruiting site.)
Among compensation sites, Compensation & Benefits Review is the hands down winner.
For management and leadership, MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Online, and Workforce Management lead the pack.
For talent management Performance and Talent Management Blog by Success Factors, Inc., is strongest, followed by Taleo's Talent Management Blog.
What sites did you expect to find on the list? Do you have other sites you'd like us to look at? Contact us.
In the May 2006 edition, we wrote about the top search terms in the field of Human resources. (Interested? See the back issue.)
Notes: Page Rank describes a combination of credibility or "importance" factors as seen by Google's robots. Google does not reveal the exact formula. The page ranks of the publications above range from 5 to 8, on a scale 1 of 10. (The scale is probably not linear, though that's just speculation. In other words, it's harder to get from 5 to 6 than it is to go from 2 to 3).
Notes: Alexa.com measures traffic trends, among other things. The traffic of the above sites varies widely, but each is at the top of its category.
