Is it better to delete old job pages on a recruitment site?
-
My client (online recruitment) has over 1.5 million pages indexed, the majority of which are old job posts and listings since they began.
I wanted to know if it would be better to keep all of the pages, or advise my client to delete some of the archive as these pages will no longer be attracting traffic.
-
Thank you. This makes complete sense, some great recommendations for making the old pages have some on-going purpose.
-
I'd recommend re-purposing the pages with expired listings. I imagine a lot of those pages rank pretty well for longtail phrases (for example something like "part-time dump truck driving job in rome, georgia") which are highly targeted and likely have minimal competition. Even if the job opening is no longer available, there is still value in keeping that page alive for the sake of ranking in the search engines. A couple of suggestions -
1. Set up a contact form/email opt-in for users to fill out to "let me know when jobs like this become available." This enables you to capture useful contact information from your users which you can use as you see fit.
2. Provide links to similar job listings that are available. For example, put on the page "this job listing has expired but check out other jobs in Rome, Georgia or dump truck driving jobs within 50 miles", etc. This way you keep the user on your site instead of them going to a competitor's site.
Otherwise, if you decide to delete a lot of these pages then you'll lose any existing rankings/traffic as a result.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Too many links per page? Double navigation on every page...
I have a client with navigation across the top of each page plus the same nav links in a sidebar on every page. Can that duplication (or the sheer number of links) on each page have a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | brm20170 -
Delete or not delete outdated content
Hi there!
On-Page Optimization | | Enrico_Cassinelli
We run a website about a region in Italy, the Langhe area, where we write about wine and food, local culture, and we give touristic informations. The website also sports a nice events calendar: in 4 years we (and our users) loaded more than 5700 events. Now, we're starting to have some troubles managing this database. The database related to events is huge both in file size and number of rows. There are a lot of images that eat up disk space, and also it's becoming difficult to manage all the data in our backend. Also, a lot of users are entering the website by landing on outdated events. I was wondering if it could be a good idea to delete events older than 6 months: the idea was to keep only the most important and yearly recurring events (which we can update each year with fresh information), and trash everything else. This of course means that 404 errors will increase, and also that our content will gettin thinner, but at the same time we'll have a more manageable database, and the content will be more relevant and "clean". What do you think? thank you 🙂 Best0 -
Worth redirecting old blog posts into pages?
I'm working on a site that has some blog posts from 2011 - 2013 ranking on the first page for relevant terms. I'm going through and updating some of the content, internal links, etc., and wanted to know if it's worth redirecting some of these blog posts into new pages (in WordPress). Right now, the blog post URLs are long - exampleURL.com/2011/3/9/blog-post-title/ and the dates show up in the SERPs. I'd like to have the date removed so that the content doesn't look outdated, and I'd also like to have cleaner URLs. In your opinion, is it worth creating new pages and redirecting the old blog posts, or is the benefit of doing this not worth the effort? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dchristensen30 -
I have more pages in my site map being blocked by the robot file than I have being allowed to be crawled. Is Google going to hate me for this?
Using some rules to block all pages which start with "copy-of" on my website because people have a bad habit of duplicating new product listings to create our refurbished, surplus etc. listings for those products. To avoid Google seeing these as duplicate pages I've blocked them in the robot file, but of course they are still automatically generated in our sitemap. How bad is this?
On-Page Optimization | | absoauto0 -
Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position. It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com". There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Altering site structure
I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site. Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner. Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered. The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense. The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category. I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong. What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages. Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Allstar1 -
Too many on-page links
Hi, My website - www.thepartyhouse.com.au is showing as having too many on-page links for over 4,000 pages. Take for example the homepage which is showing as 188 links, but I don't understand this because I've used SEO tools to display the links and I am showing around 90 links on this page. How can I see what all the links are? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Spyre0
