Best practices for repetitive job postings
-
I have a client who is a recruiter for skilled trades jobs. They post quite a few jobs on their job board on a regular basis. They frequently have job postings that are very similar to older jobs or multiple current job postings that are similar to each other.
Looking at their webmaster tools and site: command search in google, it does appear they have some duplicate content issues. We're thinking it's because of the similar job posts.
What is the best practice for dealing with this? And is there any way to correct the situation so that the number of "omitted due to similarity" results declines?
Thanks for you help!
-
Ok if the previous job posts are causing your concern, you can easily fix this by setting up meta data expiry:
_It will automatically remove the content of the page from search engines index as soon as the job becomes unavailable. _
-
It could be worth posting the question in GWT forum, so at least there might be a chance one of the google employees takes a note and may (or may not) be able to do something about penalties given to the site.
-
Hmmm... This is an interesting situation for sure!
My first thought was adding a canonical tag on the postings, but I'm sure you don't have that kind of access. My first assumption is that this kind of duplicate content isn't going to hurt you. Mainly because this is not a new situation to Google. Kind of like how a /blog page would have a snippet of the actual blog post. Would you consider that duplicate content? Technically, but Google isn't going to see it like that.
If you're super worried or concerned about this, you could always have two job descriptions for the same job. One that you have on the corporate site, and the other that you're submitting to indeed, monster, etc. This doesn't need to take too much time. You could just have some generic copy then say "...to see more about this job posting, visit http://www.yoursite.com".
I still going to be surprised if Google is seeing this as duplicate content though... Also, Google may filter it out of their SERPs, but do you have any indication that your potential applicants are finding it in the SERPs anyways?
Was that helpful?
Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps
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
-
Rewrite a good post
Hello I have a blog post from 2015 that is ranking very well on Google but I have a terrible bounce rate of more than 98% for this landing page. This post is bringing 4 more visits than the rest of my website pages so I need to make people stay in the site. I don't want to lose my rankings so my question is: Is it better to modify this post or to write a new post and delete the old one? Thank you
Technical SEO | | seoandromedical0 -
Help: Blog post translations resulting in 404 Not Found?
A client set up a website that has multilingual functionality (WPML) and the back end is a bit of a mess. The site has around 6 translated versions of the 30 or so existing English blog posts in French, Italian and Spanish - all with their own URLs. The problem is that on the remaining 24 English blog posts, the language changer in the header is still there - even though the majority of posts have not been translated - so when you go to change the language to French, it adds **?lang=fr **onto the existing english URL, and is a page not found (4xx client error). I can't redirect anything because the page does not exist. Is there a way to stop this from happening? I have noticed it's also creating italian/french/spanish translation of the english Categories too. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | skehoe0 -
Best way to handle 301 redirects on a business directory
We work with quite a few sites that promote retail traders and feature a traders' directory with pages for each of the shops (around 500 listings in most cases). As retail strips, shops come and go all the time, so I get a lot of pages that are removed as the business is no longer present. Currently I've been doing 301 redirects to the home page of the directory if you try to access a deleted trader page, but this means a ever growing htaccess file with thousands of 301 redirects. Are we handling this the best way or is there a better way to tackle this situation?
Technical SEO | | Assemblo0 -
Dates in the blog posts - on, off or regularly updated
Hello Moz community, We have a blog where we post what we believe is very valuable, unique content for our niche. The content frequently stays very relevant for our visitor for many many years. In terms of both user engagement and SEO, should we keep the dates in our blog posts? Should we remove them? Should we go through every blog post and edit it slightly every week even if there is no meaningful information we can add? Should employ some kind of plugin that does update the blog post date automatically?
Technical SEO | | SirMax0 -
What is the best approach to specifying a page's language?
I have read about a number of different tags that can accomplish this so it is very confusing. For example, should I be using: OR
Technical SEO | | BlueLinkERP0 -
Paging Links Code - Best Way?
Currently we are using previous 1 2 3 next for our link to other inventory pages, with some variation of this javascript code javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$phMain$dlPagesTop$ctl01$lnkPageTop','') . Can search engines even index the other pages with this javascript? Is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
What's the best way to eliminate duplicate page content caused by blog archives?
I (obviously) can't delete the archived pages regardless of how much traffic they do/don't receive. Would you recommend a meta robot or robot.txt file? I'm not sure I'll have access to the root directory so I could be stuck with utilizing a meta robot, correct? Any other suggestions to alleviate this pesky duplicate page content issue?
Technical SEO | | ICM0 -
Disabling Wordpress Attachment Posts
having issues with every media (photo) we upload creating an additional page on the blog that is being indexed in Google. ie. post: www.mysite.com/ creates this for the photo used: www.mysite.com/blog/category/image-name/attachment/800px/
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110