Establishing our web pages as the original source

[shr109]

I'm currently working on a recrutiment website.  One of the things we do to drive traffic to the site is post our job listings out to a number of job boards eg. Indeed. These sites replicate our own job listings which means that for every job there are at least 5-10 exact duplicates on the web.  By nature the job boards have good domain authority so they always rank above us but I would still expect to see more in the way of long-tail traffic.

Is it necessary for me to claim our own job listings as the original source and if so, how do I go about doing it?

Thanks

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

Having a self referencing canonical tag on your own pages is not a problem. The canonical tag needs to go into the head of the page though (it is not valid if in the body of the html) so just make sure that the 3rd party syndication service actually provides this - it might - but it might not I am guessing. Even with the canonical I would still include a clean text link back to the original page if this is possible (both as a second indication of origin but also for the visits it might send).

[shr109]

Thanks Lynn, that's perfect!

Another question then - the job listings are syndicated out to the job boards automatically via a 3rd party (probably used by 75% of Uk recruitment companies).  If I was to put a rel=canonical tag on each job listing it should be carried over to each of the job boards which would get around the duplicate content problem. However, each job listing page on our site would carry the re=canonical tag essentially pointing back to itself. Would this cause any issues?

Thanks

[LynnPatchett]

HI,

There was a recent WBF about syndicated content which runs down the various technical ways you can attribute your listings as the original source - check it out here. It would probably also help to make sure your listings are the first ones into the index which can be done by internally linking to the new jobs (obviously), quickly adding them to your sitemap, sharing them through social channels (especially twitter) - all of which should help make sure your content is indexed quickly and ideally before it is replicated on other sites.

If the other sites have stronger authority than yours you would still really want to get one of the 3 options discussed in the video implemented. It sounds like you already have the link back to your site (option 3 in the video) so perhaps the link is not 'clean' ie a straight text link that leads to the exact job on your site and is not no-followed?

It might also depend on what kind of long tail you are looking at ranking for. Individual job ads might not pull a lot of organic traffic by themselves if they are not aggregated by type or location for example - at which point the higher authority domains are likely to show an advantage (just a thought).