What do you do about links to constantly moving pages?
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
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 -
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.
-
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 ?
-
At some level they are user generated, but then they are put into the database and handled from there.
-
I was imagining that the vast majority of their pages would be user generated job listings. But I think I was incorrect.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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)
-
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
-
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]
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Will unused/dead pages within my site that is non-linked hurt my seo?
For example my website has mysite.com/randomunusedpage.html No links go into that page from the website but it is published (came with the WP theme). Will that hurt my SEO and should I delete the page or is it harmless? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Marvellous0 -
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Page not cached
Hi there, we uploaded a page but unfortunately didn't realise it had noindex,nofollow in the meta tags. Google had cached it then decached it (i guess thats possible) it seems? now it will not cache even though the correct meta tags have been put in and we have sent links to it internally and externally. Anyone know why this page isn't being cached, the internal link to it is on the homepage and that gets cached almost every day. I even submitted it to webmaster tools to index.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content > Wordpress Comments Page
Hello Moz Community, I've create a campaign in Moz and received hundreds of errors, regarding "Duplicate Page Content". After some review, I've found that 99% of the errors in the "Duplicate Page Content" report are occurring due to Wordpress creating a new comment page (with the original post detail), if a comment is made on a blog post. The post comment can be displayed on the original blog post, but also viewable on a second URL, created by Wordpress. http://www.Example.com/example-post http://www.Example.com/example-post/comment-page-1 Anyone else experience this issue in Wordpress or this same type of report in Moz? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | DomainUltra0 -
Page Content
Our site is a home to home moving listing portal. Consumers who wants to move his home fills a form so that moving companies can cote prices. We were generating listing page URL’s by using the title submitted by customer. Unfortunately we have understood by now that many customers have entered exactly same title for their listings which has caused us having hundreds of similar page title. We have corrected all the pages which had similar meta tag and duplicate page title tags. We have also inserted controls to our software to prevent generating duplicate page title tags or meta tags. But also the page content quality not very good because page content added by customer.(example: http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/detaylar/evden-eve--6001) What should I do. Please help me.
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Pageing page and seo meta tag questions
Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Do you get credit for an external link that points to a page that's being blocked by robots.txt
Hi folks, No one, including me seems to actually know what happens!? To repeat: If site A links to /home.html on site B and site B blocks /home.html in Robots.txt, does site B get credit for that link? Does the link pass PageRank? Will Google still crawl through it? Does the domain get some juice, but not the page? I know there's other ways of doing this properly, but it is interesting no?
Technical SEO | | DaveSottimano0