Use of Robots.txt file on a job site

[WebTalent]

We are performing SEO on a large niche Job Board. My question revolves around the thought of no following all the actual job postings from their clients as they only last for 30 to 60 days. Anybody have any idea on the best way to handle this?

[malecce]

I do not know if I understand correctly
Do you want  insert no following to all the job posting that expire in 60 days?
If it 's so, you can put a control  in the cms for the date of expiry of the job posting

If  somebody  click on the offer expired by SERP, you can retrieve a little script  with a 301 redirect to the job posting similar category to the expired.Ciao

[jennita]

Hi Oliver!

Before coming to SEOmoz I used to work for OntargetJobs which is a company that has multiple niche job boards. Here's what I would recommend:

1. Keep those pages followed because people will link to them and you want to preserve as much of the link equity as you possibly can. So how do you do that?
2. Make sure that when a job expires (or gets removed, whatever) that the page gets 301 redirected to the category page the job is posted under. Depending on the niche, it may be locale based, in that case redirect it to the location. The idea here is to send the user to a helpful page for good user experience and conserve some link equity at the same time.
3. On the page that gets redirected to, program it so when a redirection happens that it displays a message at the top of the page. Something along the lines of "Oops! The job you were looking for is no longer active. However here are similar jobs in XYZ category"

Again as I mentioned above, this is a good way to help user experience, plus keep some of that link equity from the inevitable links job posting pages get.

I hope this helps!

Jen

[WebTalent]

Thanks Jennifer! Great answer - I wasn't sure if which strategy would be better. Your answer makes a lot of sense. Thanks for your input!

[jennita]

Happy to help!