Google for Jobs: how to deal with third-party sites that appear instead of your own?

[Kevin_P]

We have shared our company's job postings on several third-party websites, including The Muse, as well as putting the job postings on our own website. Our site and The Muse have about the same schema markup except for these differences:

The Muse...
• Lists Experience Requirements
• Uses HTML in the description with

tags and other markup (our website just has plain text)
• Has a Name in JobPosting
• URL is specific to the position (our website's URL just goes to the homepage)
• Has a logo URL for Organization

When you type the exact job posting's title into Google, The Muse posting shows up in Google for Jobs--not our website's duplicate copy. The only way to see our website's job posting is to type in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com".

What is a good approach for getting our website's posting to be the priority in Google for Jobs? Do we need to remove postings from third-party sites? Structure them differently? Do organic factors affect which version of the job posting is shown, and if so, can I assume that our site will face challenges outranking a big third-party site?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Kevin,

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with Google for Jobs, but here's something that caught my eye in a TechCrunch article:

To create this comprehensive list, Google first has to remove all of the duplicate listings that employers post to all of these job sites. Then, its machine learning-trained algorithms sift through and categorize them.

This sounds like it might be applicable to what you're describing. Maybe read the rest of the article? And I'm hoping you'll get further community input from folks who have actually been experimenting with this new Google function.

[Kevin_P]

Wow, a reply by the Miriam Ellis! I've found your past posts on local search very useful.

Seriously, though, this was a very good thread on which I could begin to pull. I took a look at the article and found this helpful line: "For jobs that appeared on multiple sites, Google will link you to the one with the most complete job posting." I'd be interested in knowing more about what constitutes "complete." I'm assuming it's the post that has the most schema items included and in particular the "critical" items according to Google's rich cards report. If this is the case, then it would seem that organic signals may not affect the visibility of the job posts as much as I originally suspected.

Then again, there's got to be some keyword relevance going on here.

Our website's job posting is being included in Google for Jobs. However, this posting only appears with a very specific search (typing in the exact job title plus "site:http://www.oursite.com".)

So, maybe it's a combination: multiple versions of the same job can be part of Google for Jobs, but Google for Jobs will show the posting that is both most keyword relevant and most complete. This is just a theory without significant research (everyone's favorite kind of theory, right?), but I'm going to send an email to the author of the TechCrunch article to see if there's any more detail he can share. Thanks again!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Kevin! It's nice to speak with you, too. Another article that might help:

http://www.clearedgemarketing.com/2017/06/optimize-google-jobs/

I'd love to see someone do a deep dive on the exact questions you've raised.

[Kevin_P]

Thanks, Miriam. This article offers a good summary of information that Google put out there, but it doesn't discuss factors that may affect which version of a duplicate posting appears. Ideally, there's be a way to canonical third-party duplicates, but I'm not sure if this would be possible with these huge third-party job posting sites or even if this would affect which version of the posting appeared in Google for Jobs.

[MiriamEllis]

Yeah, I'm sorry I'm not seeing a really good resource for you, Kevin. It's early days. The person who takes on the task of writing that resource will have valuable information to share. I would say your best hope is in experimentation with this, but I don't see that anyone has figured out a solution to the important questions you've asked.

[recruiterweb]

We have found the following:

1 Using the API is better than waiting for Google to crawl the jobs.
2 They have you must have data fields, but they have would like to have and be tickled pink if you have fields. Filling in all three changes rankings in the testing we have done.
3 The quality of the title you give vs the title they understand.
4 The overall authority of your site. No exact on this yet but a gut feel factor.
5 SERPs result are also jumping around like crazy just now, we see the Google for jobs panel with no links about it and then four hours later it has 4 organic links about it for the same search, then a day later 2, then a day later none, then back to four then an hour later none...

Testing google for jobs when it landed in the UK three weeks ago its results are inconsistent with its own rules, we have found jobs with the wrong suggested title format, the wrong address format, landing pages not actual jobs have found their way onto the service!!! jobs with red warning have made it onto the service and so the list goes on.