What do you do about links to constantly moving pages?

[MarloSchneider]

One of the sites I work for is an employment site, they have a job database and the job pages tend to get links.  The problem is that every time one of these jobs is filled, the job page goes away.  What should I do to keep the value from these links?

[tomcraig86]

I'd have to agree with this more! 301 to the category, that way once a new article/post/page/job etc appears under that article page, it will instantly have a boost from the PA/DA passed

[bhochstetler]

Another thing you might want to consider is the use of rel="canonical". If you use the canonical tag on each job page to point back to the appropriate category it will help those category pages rank better rather than spreading the juice out among the individual job postings.

Matt Cutts recently did a video about this practice. He talks about product pages, but it should be the same in principle. You can find the video here: Canonical all product review pages as a single url.

You will still want to handle the missing pages with a 301 or 404, but there will be less concern about losing juice every time a job is filled. And as the video says, this is something to consider but it isn't a solution for everybody.

[AlanMosley]

I would keep the pages but put a big red job taken accross the page, or if needed change the content completly.
this would give you more pages to play with when link sculpting also

[baptisteplace]

That's a good practice for small ads sites. As every of your jobs should be in a category, you should redirect the user to the category browsing page. Best page for the user and for googlebot too.

[NeilInFrance]

Hang on !

I would definitely avoid "301 back to the root page for jobs" or even a category page.

Over time, you are going to be creating a massive index of empty pages linking to a home page; that looks too spammy to me. If you want to be honest : 404 these pages- the job offer no longer exists, the page no longer exists --- you can personalise your 404 page to send the user to a relevant page

Honesty doesn't always pay though! To leverage the SEO benefits from these pages I would consider archiving the job listing, keeping the same url and just adding a message indicating that the post has been filled (an image will do)

That way, you’re keeping lots of unique content on your site and over time creating a log of pages.

To make these archived job pages useful to the user and to the search engines, dynamically add links to fresher job offers in the same category, company and town.

-       Neil

PS Does this new SeoMoz feature now mean I'm now paying to give free advise ?

[MarloSchneider]

At some level they are user generated, but then they are put into the database and handled from there.

[DonnieCooper]

I was imagining that the vast majority of their pages would be user generated job listings. But I think I was incorrect.

[MarloSchneider]

It's actually surprising how many of the links are long term links, while they do sink off of front pages and whatnot, they are still there and even the mild value of them shouldn't go to waste.

[goodnewscowboy]

Given the nature of Spencer's site, I wouldn't imagine that the incoming links to current job offers would have that long a life. So I wouldn't think that there'd be a mazzive pile up of incoming links getting 301'd.

[Getz.pro]

Sure, I would 301 to .com/jobs/ or .com/[category]/ or whatever the main page is that will never go away. Depending on what you are doing, you may 301 to the root of your domain.

This really is a structural decision.

[DonnieCooper]

I definitely am not discounting your way of handling it... I think it's fantastic, especially because it's scalable.  Where do you 301 the pages back to, the main category page?

[Getz.pro]

Well I would hope that new data would be posted often so you would not have a bad ratio of old data to knew. Google is smart enough to know that some things date out such as products, events, job post, etc.

I have not noticed a penalty, but perhaps others can add comments to this.

[DonnieCooper]

Eventually, wouldn't a large ratio of your inbound links be pointed to pages that are 301'd to another page?

It just seems to me, that Google wouldn't think that is very 'natural', and perhaps would just feel that the majority of the content on the site is old/ outdated since most of the inbound links point to pages that don't exist anymore. (even if they are 301'd)

[Getz.pro]

Yeah, I am starting to use this quite a bit with products moving off the site. No need to spill the juice

No because the 301 is dynamic. Not like adding to the .htaccess file. Also, make sure someone coding PHP does this as you need to make sure there are no white spaces before doing a header location or you will bomb the page.

Check your header to make sure you did the 301 correctly.

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers

Cheers

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Richard,

That's a useful script! Thanks!

Do you think in the case of running an employment site, those 301's would begin to rack-up frequently enough to get flagged?

[edit: I meant to add this below Richard Getz script]

[DonnieCooper]

Hey Spencer,

Is there a way you can dynamically pull the information (for the job) into the page.... so that once the job goes away, you can then change the informatino to be a new job?

The only catch to that, would be the URL structure, becuase obviously you would need to make the URL's generic, such as "/bay-county-seo-job" or something instead of mentioning the company.

On Distilled's recent conference call / webinar, Will discuess their project hiremarshall.com (I think that webinar would be of some help to you- and anyone else reading this).

Specifically, you could develop a model which keeps those pages live, so that the company uses that same page for all of their new job openings.

Donnie Cooper.

[Getz.pro]

If these pages are database driven, you can check to see if the post is in the database, if not, then 301 back to the root page for jobs.

Run a PHP script that check the database TRUE = loads the page FALSE header redirect to root page (or whatever you want) and  301 the move.

if (!$_GET['post']) {
    $location = "http://www.YourSite.com/jobs/";
       header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
    header("Location: {$location}");
    exit;

Your developer will be able to actually write a valid script testing the page and either returning the job post or redirecting the page.

I hope that helps.