Best practices for repetitive job postings

[PlusROI]

I have a client who is a recruiter for skilled trades jobs. They post quite a few jobs on their job board on a regular basis. They frequently have job postings that are very similar to older jobs or multiple current job postings that are similar to each other.

Looking at their webmaster tools and site: command search in google, it does appear they have some duplicate content issues. We're thinking it's because of the similar job posts.

What is the best practice for dealing with this? And is there any way to correct the situation so that the number of "omitted due to similarity" results declines?

Thanks for you help!

[GuestBlogPoster.com]

Hmmm... This is an interesting situation for sure!

My first thought was adding a canonical tag on the postings, but I'm sure you don't have that kind of access. My first assumption is that this kind of duplicate content isn't going to hurt you. Mainly because this is not a new situation to Google. Kind of like how a /blog page would have a snippet of the actual blog post. Would you consider that duplicate content? Technically, but Google isn't going to see it like that.

If you're super worried or concerned about this, you could always have two job descriptions for the same job. One that you have on the corporate site, and the other that you're submitting to indeed, monster, etc. This doesn't need to take too much time. You could just have some generic copy then say "...to see more about this job posting, visit http://www.yoursite.com".

I still going to be surprised if Google is seeing this as duplicate content though... Also, Google may filter it out of their SERPs, but do you have any indication that your potential applicants are finding it in the SERPs anyways?

Was that helpful?

Kevin Phelps
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwphelps

[Andropenis_Australia]

It could be worth posting the question in GWT forum, so at least there might be a chance one of the google employees takes a note and may (or may not) be able to do something about penalties given to the site.

[Debdulal]

Ok if the previous job posts are causing your concern, you can easily fix this by setting up meta data expiry:

_It will automatically remove the content of the page from search engines index as soon as the job becomes unavailable. _