What do you do about links to constantly moving pages?
-
One of the sites I work for is an employment site, they have a job database and the job pages tend to get links. The problem is that every time one of these jobs is filled, the job page goes away. What should I do to keep the value from these links?
-
I'd have to agree with this more! 301 to the category, that way once a new article/post/page/job etc appears under that article page, it will instantly have a boost from the PA/DA passed
-
Another thing you might want to consider is the use of rel="canonical". If you use the canonical tag on each job page to point back to the appropriate category it will help those category pages rank better rather than spreading the juice out among the individual job postings.
Matt Cutts recently did a video about this practice. He talks about product pages, but it should be the same in principle. You can find the video here: Canonical all product review pages as a single url.
You will still want to handle the missing pages with a 301 or 404, but there will be less concern about losing juice every time a job is filled. And as the video says, this is something to consider but it isn't a solution for everybody.
-
I would keep the pages but put a big red job taken accross the page, or if needed change the content completly.
this would give you more pages to play with when link sculpting also -
That's a good practice for small ads sites. As every of your jobs should be in a category, you should redirect the user to the category browsing page. Best page for the user and for googlebot too.
-
Hang on !
I would definitely avoid "301 back to the root page for jobs" or even a category page.
Over time, you are going to be creating a massive index of empty pages linking to a home page; that looks too spammy to me. If you want to be honest : 404 these pages- the job offer no longer exists, the page no longer exists --- you can personalise your 404 page to send the user to a relevant page
Honesty doesn't always pay though! To leverage the SEO benefits from these pages I would consider archiving the job listing, keeping the same url and just adding a message indicating that the post has been filled (an image will do)
That way, you’re keeping lots of unique content on your site and over time creating a log of pages.
To make these archived job pages useful to the user and to the search engines, dynamically add links to fresher job offers in the same category, company and town.
- Neil
PS Does this new SeoMoz feature now mean I'm now paying to give free advise ?
-
At some level they are user generated, but then they are put into the database and handled from there.
-
I was imagining that the vast majority of their pages would be user generated job listings. But I think I was incorrect.
-
It's actually surprising how many of the links are long term links, while they do sink off of front pages and whatnot, they are still there and even the mild value of them shouldn't go to waste.
-
Given the nature of Spencer's site, I wouldn't imagine that the incoming links to current job offers would have that long a life. So I wouldn't think that there'd be a mazzive pile up of incoming links getting 301'd.
-
Sure, I would 301 to .com/jobs/ or .com/[category]/ or whatever the main page is that will never go away. Depending on what you are doing, you may 301 to the root of your domain.
This really is a structural decision.
-
I definitely am not discounting your way of handling it... I think it's fantastic, especially because it's scalable. Where do you 301 the pages back to, the main category page?
-
Well I would hope that new data would be posted often so you would not have a bad ratio of old data to knew. Google is smart enough to know that some things date out such as products, events, job post, etc.
I have not noticed a penalty, but perhaps others can add comments to this.
-
Eventually, wouldn't a large ratio of your inbound links be pointed to pages that are 301'd to another page?
It just seems to me, that Google wouldn't think that is very 'natural', and perhaps would just feel that the majority of the content on the site is old/ outdated since most of the inbound links point to pages that don't exist anymore. (even if they are 301'd)
-
Yeah, I am starting to use this quite a bit with products moving off the site. No need to spill the juice
No because the 301 is dynamic. Not like adding to the .htaccess file. Also, make sure someone coding PHP does this as you need to make sure there are no white spaces before doing a header location or you will bomb the page.
Check your header to make sure you did the 301 correctly.
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers
Cheers
-
Hey Richard,
That's a useful script! Thanks!
Do you think in the case of running an employment site, those 301's would begin to rack-up frequently enough to get flagged?
[edit: I meant to add this below Richard Getz script]
-
Hey Spencer,
Is there a way you can dynamically pull the information (for the job) into the page.... so that once the job goes away, you can then change the informatino to be a new job?
The only catch to that, would be the URL structure, becuase obviously you would need to make the URL's generic, such as "/bay-county-seo-job" or something instead of mentioning the company.
On Distilled's recent conference call / webinar, Will discuess their project hiremarshall.com (I think that webinar would be of some help to you- and anyone else reading this).
Specifically, you could develop a model which keeps those pages live, so that the company uses that same page for all of their new job openings.
Donnie Cooper.
-
If these pages are database driven, you can check to see if the post is in the database, if not, then 301 back to the root page for jobs.
Run a PHP script that check the database TRUE = loads the page FALSE header redirect to root page (or whatever you want) and 301 the move.
if (!$_GET['post']) {
$location = "http://www.YourSite.com/jobs/";
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: {$location}");
exit;Your developer will be able to actually write a valid script testing the page and either returning the job post or redirecting the page.
I hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Page disappeared from Google index. Google cache shows page is being redirected.
My URL is: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse Hi. The week before last, my top Converse page went missing from the Google index. When I "fetch as Googlebot" I am able to get the page and "submit" it to the index. I have done this several times and still cannot get the page to show up. When I look at the Google cache of the page, it comes up with a different page. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse shows: http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/pop-in-olivia-kim Back story: As far as I know we have never redirected the Converse page to the Pop-In page. However the reverse may be true. We ran a Converse based Pop-In campaign but that used the Converse page and not the regular Pop-In page. Though the page comes back with a 200 status, it looks like Google thinks the page is being redirected. We were ranking #4 for "converse" - monthly searches = 550,000. My SEO traffic for the page has tanked since it has gone missing. Any help would be much appreciated. Stephan
Technical SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
Want to move site to wordpress and keep links without using redicrects
I have an old cluny site that has been around for about 56 years. It is on the homestead platform. I want to move the site to a thesis theme 2.1 wordpress platform without losing my links. I would prefer not to do 301 redicrects. With thesis I can specify the URL for each page of the wordpress site, however the wordpress site is hosted on hostgator as a subdomain of another site and the other problem is that wordpress adds a back slash that is not present on the old site. I can, however add .html to the URL's for pages on the wordpress site to conform to the URL's on the old html site. Will this work? thx Paul p.s. the URL for my old site is www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com
Technical SEO | | diogenes0 -
Followed Linking Root Domains and No Followed Linking Domains
If you have more NoFollowed Linking Root Domains than Followed Linking Root Domains is that a problem?
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
Internal links of my website is taken as inbound link ?
Hi, I was checking my links in Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.bons-plans-vacances.fr) this morning and i came up with this: My main domain is taken as outbound links ...! This link : www.bons-plans-vacances.fr/ Anchor Text : (img alt)100% Bons Plans Voyages From this URL : www.bons-plans-vacances.fr/ I have the same problem with my subdomains : voyage.bons-plans-vacances.fr/sejour/Toutes-Destinations I have that HTML code on the link : Any help ? This is very strange .. i have the same result in google webmaster tools. Thanks 🙂 eDE9b.jpg
Technical SEO | | BonsPlansvacances0 -
Internal links to low value pages
Hi, We're doing a big content update on our product pages and I'm looking for some advice about our internal linking. In a nutshell, the current design we're using links out from every product page (i.e. plants) to a set of accessory pages (i.e. things to help you plant the plants). The screenshot shows how this works. The accessories we sell are a very small part of our business and don't attract significant or valuable search traffic. It's the plant pages that pull in the visits and make the money.
Technical SEO | | jdeb
The reason for all these links to accessory pages is for usabilty & to reduce the volume of support calls about accessories (we get a lot of those). So my concern is that by linking out to these relatively low value accessory pages from all of our plant product pages, we will be spilling link juice from all our important pages to a small set of unimportant ones. Should I be concerned about this and if so, what should I do differently? I have considered: Making an intermediary page, listing the relevant accessories, so that each product page links to one intermediary page, which then links to all the accessories. Using nofollow on the accessory page links - there is so much info out there about this, much of it conflicting, that I just don't know if that's a good or bad idea. Using some kind of java-based pop-up box to list the accessory links that will hide the links from spiders. Linking back from the accessory pages to the relevant product sub-category pages to loop the flow of link juice. All ideas welcome zoBgC0 -
Diagnostic says too many links on a page and most of the pages are from blog entries. Are tags considered links? How do I decrease links?
I just ran my first diagnostic on my site and the results came back were negative in the area of too many links one a page. There were also quite a few 404 errors. What is the best way to fix these problems? Most of the pages with too many links are from blog posts, are the tags counted as well and is this the reason for too many links?
Technical SEO | | Newport10300 -
Good links pratice for listing pages?
Hello, I'm wondering which is the best way to handle this kindle of page... You can have a look at my screen capture, or see directly my page here. I've in my case, for the same "ski resort", 3 differents anchor link type (title, image and more info…), all of them are going on the same page. I know it's not that good, my idea, it to keep only the more info like, but with a better anchor link, something like : more information about this ski resort... Thanks in advance 🙂 Best regards links.jpg
Technical SEO | | Alexandre_0