This is an interesting one – SEJ are reporting today that Google are to issue penalties for expired job postings.
Apparently, this will only affect expired job listings with job posting markup – not random vacancies posted on company websites.
It does make a lot of sense as I regularly see SERPs for more generic terms that are dominated by countless job listings. A search for “web developer” (from Edinburgh) returns a lot of job boards up top and agencies / local results lower down the page. For queries like this I would expect them to be better served with service related results, rather than job related results.
I ran a career advice website for many years – it’s a high volume and relatively high competition area.
As a business model, a job board is not unlike a link directory – with the right skills, you could set one up pretty cheaply – it’s just the listings you need. Without that content in place, it’s tough to rank for competitive terms (job titles). I would suspect that there are lots of lower tier job boards that leave expired listings on their sites to keep the organic traffic coming in. Indeed, there are probably lots with fake listings just to grab the organic traffic.
There’s a chicken v egg scenario here. It’s easier to get people to advertise their jobs on your board if you’re ranking well for relevant terms – but it’s easier to get those rankings if you have job listings.
It would seem that Google are laying down the law on this one. Get the job listings first – then the rankings come after. Most businesses will do this already, so I wouldn’t expect many to be affected by this change. Those that are affected were always going to have to adapt their business model.
Yet another clear example of why businesses shouldn’t base their model on Google rankings. Organic results compliment a sustainable business model – they shouldn’t be propping it.
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