Software provider JobBoardly just pushed out a great SEO hack that seems interesting. They maintain an expired job as a page to get more traffic while telling the viewer that is had expired. This should result in more traffic to your site.
They announced it in an email;
This week, after hearing community feedback, we made a change to how expired job listings are handled on the platform. Instead of expired job listings being taken down and 404ing, they are now updated to show the job is expired for one month, after which it is then moved to 410.
The benefits of this change are that it allows the page to retain the traffic from the listing while informing job seekers that the job listing is now expired, instead of just seeing a 404’d page. Moving the expired job listings to 410 also has SEO benefits over just 404ing the job listings.
This change is now live for all job boards, and you can see this feature in action by visiting expired job listings once they have expired to see their updated status.
A few of my readers chimed in that it may not be that useful though because Google doesn’t like expired jobs.
“Google often leverages messaging like “expired” or “role is filled” to label a page as a “soft 404” meaning, despite the page being alive and well, its recognizing the intent (open job) is missing and algorithmically gets removed from the search results. It’s not immediate, but if the page stays live that way for long enough, it’s likely to fall into this classification.: – Nick, SEOjobs
The issue with this is that if anyone submits these jobs to Google for Jobs, Google will see this and eventually put the job board in a penalty box and block the board from posting jobs, or downgrade promotion of the jobs in GfJ so greatly that it effectively stops any inbound free GfJ traffic. -Joe, Lensa
