Can Google Crawl This Page?

[shr109]

I'm going to have to post the page in question which i'd rather not do but I have permission from the client to do so.

Question: A recruitment client of mine had their website build on a proprietary platform by a so-called recruitment specialist agency.  Unfortunately the site is not performing well in the organic listings.

I believe the culprit is this page and others like it: http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0

Basically as soon as you deviate from the top level pages you land on pages that have database-query URLs like this one.  My take on it is that Google cannot crawl these pages and is therefore having trouble picking up all of the job listings.  I have taken some measures to combat this and obviously we have an xml sitemap in place but it seems the pages that Google finds via the XML feed are not performing because there is no obvious flow of 'link juice' to them.

There are a number of latest jobs listed on top level pages like this one: http://www.prospect-health.com/optometry-jobs and when they are picked up they perform Ok in the SERPs, which is the biggest clue to the problem outlined above.

The agency in question have an SEO department who dispute the problem and their proposed solution is to create more content and build more links (genius!).

Just looking for some clarification from you guys if you don't mind?

[N1ghteyes]

I think your pretty much spot on. Google -can- crawl queries but they wont rank very well at all.

Your best bet will be to change: (just reading into this that looks like a 'get all jobs' query)

http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs/?st=0&o3=973&s=1&o4=1215&sortdir=desc&displayinstance=Advanced Search_Site1&pagesize=50000&page=1&o1=255&sortby=CreationDate&o2=260&ij=0

to just

http://www.prospect-health.com/Jobs

There are loads of ways to remove the query string and keep the functionality, depending on the software powering the site, personally i'd fix up the search to POST data so that it keeps the url clean and add in the appropriate routes to create the path.

I have some experience of job search sites (having worked on a couple of the largest in the UK) and breaking URLS down something like this seems to work best. (depending on the data you have obviously)

<domain>/jobs/<location>/</location></domain>

You could also take a look at how other job sites structure their URLS, (monster.co.uk, targetjobs.co.uk, jobsite.co.uk etc)

Let me know if you need a hand and i'll see if i can be more specific. (you'll have to tell me what its running on though)

EDIT:: You should force lower-case on urls as well. Caps wont effect google but they arn't user friendly (miss types etc)

[shr109]

Thanks Toby, good to get a second opinion on these things and some clarification.

The platform is the agency's own proprietary one but i don't know if it's based on an existing framework or completely bespoke. Having looked at some of the other sites they have build though, it seems other clients are experiencing similar indexing problems as they have all utilised a workaround of some sort.

I'll share the name of the agency with you by email if you want to do some digging but I don't think it's fair to name and shame them on here - shr109@hotmail.com

[N1ghteyes]

Hi shr109,

I've sent an email over so you have my address. Please let me know if it doesnt come through, we're recovering from a couple of email issues this end (infected web server in the same IP Subnet as our email server got us blacklisted), it might have ended up in spam!

Thanks,