Frank VitovichGoogle recently announced some new guidelines for inclusion in Google Jobs to help improve the overall user experience with this Google Product.
Violating them could result in manual action from Google and/or prevent your site from appearing in Google Jobs.
Any job listings website should be obsessed with ensuring they stay within these new guidelines outlined by Google. With Botify, you can ensure you’re indexable and visible in the SERPS by complying with the new guidelines.
The following three guidelines are all new to Google Jobs:
Let’s start with the easiest to audit – Jobs structured data. Botify automatically collects structured data for the most popular data types, including jobs.
To make sure that your URLs have Jobs structured data present, all it takes is a quick filter to find all of your job listings pages that have (or don’t have) the Jobs Opening main object.
You can take your auditing to the next level to ensure you are giving Google as much data as possible in your listings if you combine some filters with a metrics table. This allows you to track how many of your listings have specific values within Jobs structured data over time as well.
In this example we can see what values are missing within all pages that have the Jobs main data type and then the action on updating these listings.
To remove a job listing, Google’s given three pretty simple methods for doing so:
If you remove a URL and return a 404 or 410, Botify won’t find those URLs in a crawl of your website as long as you remove links to those listings. If any of them are still linked in your site structure though, you can simply take a look at how many of your URLs in the listings segment return either a 404 or 410 status code and monitor them over time.
Removing a job listing might not be the best method though. For instance, maybe your listings end up getting a lot of backlinks. Who wants to have a lot of backlinks pointing to 404’s or 410’s?
Should you remove the structured data on your listings but leave them live on your site, all you need to do to ensure that these URLs stay within guidelines is run a quick filter to find all of your URLs in your listings segment that do not have jobs listings structured data.
This is a very quick filter in the URL Explorer. Something as simple as this will do the trick:
Now, some would argue that having separate rules for when structured data is and isn’t present could present a development team with an unneeded challenge.
Enter the “validThrough” field in your structured data. Instead of removing pages or structured data, is you just use this field in your job listings, you will stay within guidelines with relative ease.
Botify extracts this field for you on every crawl so if it’s present on your pages, we’ll find and we can easily set up a report to find all of your job listings that have a expiration date in the past or to find any job listings your have live on site that do not have this field present.
Once the jobs are removed, Google also says to resubmit your listings sitemap by sending a GET request to the following this URL.
The last step in the process of ensuring compliance with Google’s new guidelines is to make sure that all jobs details are present in the job description. All Google is requesting here is that any information that you include in your jobs structured data also appears on the page.
In short, they don’t want anyone stuffing more information in the structured data than what is visible to the end user. For instance, if the salary is present in the structured data, it should be present on site as well.
Because we’re already pulling in your structured data we already know we don’t need to set up any html extracts for that data. If you want to go the extra mile to ensure compliance though, you can set up html extracts to pull in all of the visible on-page elements on your jobs listings and match them with the values found in your structured data. Botify’s new CSS Selectors html extract rules make setting these up pretty painless.
Once you have everything in place to track your Google Jobs compliance, you can make life a lot easier on yourself and combine a few key KPI’s into a single Custom Report that gets emailed to you automatically upon completion of every crawl.
