Google for Jobs: how to deal with third-party sites that appear instead of your own?
-
We have shared our company's job postings on several third-party websites, including The Muse, as well as putting the job postings on our own website. Our site and The Muse have about the same schema markup except for these differences:
The Muse...
• Lists Experience Requirements
• Uses HTML in the description withtags and other markup (our website just has plain text)
• Has a Name in JobPosting
• URL is specific to the position (our website's URL just goes to the homepage)
• Has a logo URL for OrganizationWhen you type the exact job posting's title into Google, The Muse posting shows up in Google for Jobs--not our website's duplicate copy. The only way to see our website's job posting is to type in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com".
What is a good approach for getting our website's posting to be the priority in Google for Jobs? Do we need to remove postings from third-party sites? Structure them differently? Do organic factors affect which version of the job posting is shown, and if so, can I assume that our site will face challenges outranking a big third-party site?
-
We have found the following:
1 Using the API is better than waiting for Google to crawl the jobs.
2 They have you must have data fields, but they have would like to have and be tickled pink if you have fields. Filling in all three changes rankings in the testing we have done.
3 The quality of the title you give vs the title they understand.
4 The overall authority of your site. No exact on this yet but a gut feel factor.
5 SERPs result are also jumping around like crazy just now, we see the Google for jobs panel with no links about it and then four hours later it has 4 organic links about it for the same search, then a day later 2, then a day later none, then back to four then an hour later none...Testing google for jobs when it landed in the UK three weeks ago its results are inconsistent with its own rules, we have found jobs with the wrong suggested title format, the wrong address format, landing pages not actual jobs have found their way onto the service!!! jobs with red warning have made it onto the service and so the list goes on.
-
Yeah, I'm sorry I'm not seeing a really good resource for you, Kevin. It's early days. The person who takes on the task of writing that resource will have valuable information to share. I would say your best hope is in experimentation with this, but I don't see that anyone has figured out a solution to the important questions you've asked.
-
Thanks, Miriam. This article offers a good summary of information that Google put out there, but it doesn't discuss factors that may affect which version of a duplicate posting appears. Ideally, there's be a way to canonical third-party duplicates, but I'm not sure if this would be possible with these huge third-party job posting sites or even if this would affect which version of the posting appeared in Google for Jobs.
-
Hi Kevin! It's nice to speak with you, too. Another article that might help:
http://www.clearedgemarketing.com/2017/06/optimize-google-jobs/
I'd love to see someone do a deep dive on the exact questions you've raised.
-
Wow, a reply by the Miriam Ellis! I've found your past posts on local search very useful.
Seriously, though, this was a very good thread on which I could begin to pull. I took a look at the article and found this helpful line: "For jobs that appeared on multiple sites, Google will link you to the one with the most complete job posting." I'd be interested in knowing more about what constitutes "complete." I'm assuming it's the post that has the most schema items included and in particular the "critical" items according to Google's rich cards report. If this is the case, then it would seem that organic signals may not affect the visibility of the job posts as much as I originally suspected.
Then again, there's got to be some keyword relevance going on here.
Our website's job posting is being included in Google for Jobs. However, this posting only appears with a very specific search (typing in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com".)
So, maybe it's a combination: multiple versions of the same job can be part of Google for Jobs, but Google for Jobs will show the posting that is both most keyword relevant and most complete. This is just a theory without significant research (everyone's favorite kind of theory, right?), but I'm going to send an email to the author of the TechCrunch article to see if there's any more detail he can share. Thanks again!
-
Hey Kevin,
I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Google for Jobs, but here's something that caught my eye in a TechCrunch article:
To create this comprehensive list, Google first has to remove all of the duplicate listings that employers post to all of these job sites. Then, its machine learning-trained algorithms sift through and categorize them.
This sounds like it might be applicable to what you're describing. Maybe read the rest of the article? And I'm hoping you'll get further community input from folks who have actually been experimenting with this new Google function.
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
-
Different variations of my site (www ; non www ; https ; http) have different authority status
In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions of my site gets treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score. eg. http://mydomain.com DA 38 PA 37 http://www.mydomain.com DA 28 PA 27. Currently our preferred variation is https://www.mydomain.com but it used o be http://mydomain.com for 3+ years and I can see that the non www version of my domain have more authority. Would you advise us to "change back" to setting our preferred url as the non www version as before or would it have a negative impact on our SERP ranking etc if we change it again now?
Local Website Optimization | | shaunn140 -
Best SEO Option for Multi-site Set-up
Hi Guys, We have a Business to Business Software Website. We are Global business but mainly operate in Ireland, UK and USA. I would like your input on best practice for domain set-up for best SEO results in local markets. Currently we have: example.com (no market specified) and now we are creating: example.com/ie (Ireland) example.com/uk (united kingdom) example.com/us (united states) My question is mainly based on the example.com/us website - should we create example.com/us for the US market OR just use example.com for the US the market? If the decision is example.com/us should we build links to the directory or the main .com website. To summarize there is two questions: 1. Advise on domain set-up 2. Which site to build links to if example.com/us is the decision. Thank you in advance, Glen.
Local Website Optimization | | DigitalCRO0 -
I've submitted my site to google search console, and only 6 images of 89 images have been indexed in 2 weeks. Should I be worried?
I've submitted my site to google search console, and only 6 images of 89 images have been indexed in 2 weeks. Should I be worried? My site is http://bayareahomebirth.org Images are a pretty big part of this site's content and SEO value. Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | mattchew0 -
Google My Business
I have a question about Google my Business. Currently I have a business that's been verified. I would like to add another business with the same address. The businesses are different (name, website, phone number) but the primary address is the same. Is this something that can be done? Thanks for your help.
Local Website Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
How can I migrate a website's content to a new WP theme, delete the old site, and avoid duplication and other issues?
Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!
Local Website Optimization | | jampaper1 -
How to approach SEO for a national umbrella site that has multiple chapters in different locations that are different URLS
We are currently working with a client who has one national site - let's call it CompanyName.net, and multiple, independent chapter sites listed under different URLs that are structured, for example, as CompanyNamechicago.org, and sometimes specific to neighborhoods, as in CompanyNamechicago.org/lakeview.org. The national site is .net, while all others are .orgs. These are not subdomains or subfolders, as far as we can tell. You can use a search function on the .net site to find a location near you and click to that specific local site. They are looking for help optimizing and increasing traffic to certain landing pages on the .net site...but similar landing pages also exist on a local level, which appear to be competing with the national site. (Example: there is a landing page on the national .net umbrella site for a "dog safety" campaign they are doing, but also that campaign has led to a landing page created independently on the local CompanyNameChicago.org website, which seems to get higher ranking due to a user looking for this info while located in Chicago. We are wondering if our hands are tied here since they appear to be competing for traffic with all their localized sites, or if there are best practices to handle a situation like this. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | timfrick0 -
Duplicate content question for multiple sites under one brand
I would like to get some opinions on the best way to handle duplicate / similar content that is on our company website and local facility level sites. Our company website is our flagship website that contains all of our service offerings, and we use this site to complete nationally for our SEO efforts. We then have around 100 localized facility level sites for the different locations we operate that we use to rank for local SEO. There is enough of a difference between these locations that it was decided (long ago before me) that there would be a separate website for each. There is however, much duplicate content across all these sites due to the service offerings being roughly the same. Every website has it's own unique domain name, but I believe they are all on the same C-block. I'm thinking of going with 1 of 2 options and wanted to get some opinions on which would be best. 1 - Keep the services content identical across the company website and all facility sites, and use the rel=canonical tag on all the facility sites to reference the company website. My only concern here is if this would drastically hurt local SEO for the facility sites. 2 - Create two unique sets of services content. Use one set on the company website. And use the second set on the facility sites, and either live with the duplicate content or try and sprinkle in enough local geographic content to create some differential between the facility sites. Or if there are other suggestions on a better way to handle this, I would love to hear any other thoughts as well. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | KHCreative0 -
Do more page links work against a Google SEO ranking when there is only 1 url that other sites will link to?
Say I have a coupon site in a major city and assume there are 20 main locations regions (suburb cities) in that city. Assume that all external links to my site will be to only the home page. www.site.com Assume also that my website business has no physical location. Which scenario is better? 1. One home page that serves up dynamic results based on the user cookie location, but mentions all 20 locations in the content. Google indexes 1 page only, and all external links are to it. 2. One home page that redirects to the user region (one of 20 pages), and therefore will have 20 pages--one for each region that is optimized for that region. Google indexes 20 pages and there will be internal links to the other 19 pages, BUT all external links are still only to the main home page. Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | couponguy0