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
-
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
"One Page With Two Links To Same Page; We Counted The First Link" Is this true?
I read this to day http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718 I thought to myself, yep, thats what I been reading in Moz for years ( pitty Matt could not confirm that still the case for 2014) But reading though the comments Michael Martinez of http://www.seo-theory.com/ pointed out that Mat says "...the last time I checked, was 2009, and back then -- uh, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page."
Technical SEO | | PaddyDisplays
Which would imply that is does not not mean it always the first link. Michael goes on to say "Back in 2008 when Rand WRONGLY claimed that Google was only counting the first link (I shared results of a test where it passed anchor text from TWO links on the same page)" then goes on to say " In practice the search engine sometimes skipped over links and took anchor text from a second or third link down the page." For me this is significant. I know people that have had "SEO experts" recommend that they should have a blog attached to there e-commence site and post blog posts (with no real interest for readers) with anchor text links to you landing pages. I thought that posting blog post just for anchor text link was a waste of time if you are already linking to the landing page with in a main navigation as google would see that link first. But if Michael is correct then these type of blog posts anchor text link blog posts would have value But who is' right Rand or Michael?0 -
Too many navigational links
Hi there, I have an issue with the amount of internal links on my webpages. Moz campaign manager gives a lot of 'too many on page links' issues. Over 7000.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
I know the importance of a good internal linking structure. 1. Not too many internal links (over approximately 100) is good for flowing through some authority from authoritive pages.
2. Too many internal links can spend all of the 'crawler budget' so the crawlers won't crawl the complete website anymore (right?). This can cause problems with indexing new webpages (right?). This is the situation: The website is a webshop The header contains 6 links, the footer contains 32 links, the homepage contains 42 links, the body content of some category pages contains a variated amount of links from 30 to a maximum of 100 links. Product pages do contain a maximum of 25 links. There is no problem here. Now here's the problem: The website navigation is a dropdown menu that contains 167 links to tier 2. These links are very important for our visitors. They can immediately find the right category/product by it. Removing or shrinking this dropdown is not an option. But the dropdown navigation is causing all of the 'too many on page links' issues. Question: is there a SEO (indexing, PA) problem in this situation which i should solve? What should I solve and how should I solve this? Note: pages have good organic positions and authority. Thanks a lot. Marcel0 -
Does Google Still Pass Anchor Text for Multiple Links to the Same Page When Using a Hashtag? What About Indexation?
Both of these seem a little counter-intuitive to me so I want to make sure I'm on the same page. I'm wondering if I need to add "#s to my internal links when the page I'm linking to is already: a.) in the site's navigation b.) in the sidebar More specifically, in your experience...do the search engines only give credit to (or mostly give credit to) the anchor text used in the navigation and ignore the anchor text used in the body of the article? I've found (in here) a couple of folks mentioning that content after a hashtagged link isn't indexed. Just so I understand this... a.) if I were use a hashtag at the end of a link as the first link in the body of a page, this means that the rest of the article won't be indexed? b.) if I use a table of contents at the top of a page and link to places within the document, then only the areas of the page up to the table of contents will be indexed/crawled? Thanks ahead of time! I really appreciate the help.
Technical SEO | | Spencer_LuminInteractive0 -
Specific Link Page in Domain
Hi everyone: I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links. They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence. I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things: No follow in links. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector. Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all. ¿Could some one give me their opinion? Cheers !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Moving subdomain ? How to ?
Hi all. I've purchased a domain name two years ago with the idea to offer wide range of services. I've also created a sub-domain providing specific service for highly competitive keyword. Sadly plans went wrong and I didn't use the root domain name at all, just the sub-domain providing that service. There aren't much links to that sub-domain, but all are quality links, until recently I've managed to keep positions between 5 and 7 without any effort, but yesterday I saw that it's dropped to 9. The question is, before I start to build links and write articles to get back up my domain, is it worth to move that sub-domain to my original root domain. As I said, there aren't much links to that sub-domain, it only has pagerank1, also for the last year the original root domain was redirected (301) to the sub-domain to not loose traffic and I'm scared if I reverse this procedure and redirect my sub-domain to the root domain that Google will get confused. It's a tricky question I know 🙂
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0 -
How to measure number of links out from a page
Following on from earlier Q, what do you all use to count links out from a page. I believe there is a bing tool which does this, though rather than a list of sites a simple number would be ideal?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
How to optimize achor text links on ecommerce category page
A category page on an e-commerce sites, containing a list of the products within the category, usually shows the product image above the product text link. If both image and anchor text link to the product page, this would mean that the image is counted as the link in terms of ranking value. What would be the best way to make the anchor text count in stead of the image? I guess some ways would be: 1. Not making the product image a link
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency
2. Using some kind of link masking / redirecting technique for the image
3. Employing a technical trick to make the anchor text link come first in the code readable by search engines. What would be the easiest way to solve this issue? Or do you believe it's not worth bothering?0