5 things you need to know about Google for Jobs new algorithm

Today, the 1st of October, Google has rolled out a new Google For Jobs algorithm aiming to improve the candidates’ experience when searching for jobs in Google.


There are important factors that you have to follow if you are integrating your career page with Google for Jobs usng structured data. These new algorithn has new properties and a new content policy that will not tolerate irrelevant or spammy contents.


What is Google for Jobs?

full-stack-developer-jobs-Google-Search

When searching Google, if you add jobs at the end of your query, you will see a highlighted results dedicated for jobs around your location. In addition, you can filter by location, job type, date posted and many other filtering criteria.

How about the search volume? should I care?

Jobs near me - US Search Volume
Jobs near me - UK Search Volume

The number of searches for the phrase “jobs near me” in the US last month was 1.8 million. In the UK it was around 360,000. This is just for that exact phrase. Other related keywords that candidates use are:

– part time jobs near me.

– jobs hiring near me.

– jobs near me part time.

– jobs near me work from home.

And many more.

5 Changes that you should care about

There are 5 important changes that you should care about as Google is going to penalise web pages that do not follow these guidelines.

1) Direct Apply

Your traffic will be impacted if your ATS or career page redirects the candidates multiple times before finding the application form.

There is a new boolean property in the structured data called Direct Apply. Direct Apply means the candidate should click apply on the page and get to the application form. Any redirects that impact this flow will be penalized by Google.

2) Expired Jobs and job posting dates

expired jobs

Expired jobs should be removed by either updating the validThrough markup or withdraw the whole page. The other exciting issue that Google is aiming to improve is ensuring the job posting date is genuine. Masking old jobs with a new publish date will result in breaching the new content policy.

Looking closely at this point, using the same job descriptions to advertise opening roles at different times might give Google a wrong signal that this is an old one trying to jump up in the search results. That’s why you should be careful posting the same content again and again.

3) Limited HTML elements are supported

supported html elements by Google For Jobs

For standard SEO, you would use headings like h1 and h2. You will also use images with alt text to ensure you cover all the keywords you are after to increase your keyword density.

With Google for Jobs, this will not provide any extra results. There are only a handful of elements supported, and they are

<p>, <ul> and <li>. With the essential paragraph breaking <br> and \n.

When using structured data, make sure you start with essential parts of your job description and avoid any unnecessary HTML tags.

4) New Content Policy

proper job description

The new content policy focuses on ensuring the job description describes the job understandably and accurately. 

For instance, Google will not allow incomplete job descriptions. We have analyzed 3.3 million job descriptions and found that 9000+ job descriptions are shorter than 55 words, in perspective, shorter than a tweet. Click here to read the analysis.

Job descriptions with grammar mistakes, all capitalized and unknown acronyms or abbreviations will not be allowed too.

5) New Properties

new-proprties

There are new recommended properties introduced to enhance the job search. These are:

– applicantLocationRequirements if your advertised job can be done from home, but you need the candidate to be in a particular geographical location, this new property is mandatory.

– baseSalary is recommended and will help you to rank higher in google search. You should mention the salary range, currency and salary unit (day, week, month or year).

– employmentType is it full time, part time, contractor … etc.

And there are some new beta properties too, around months of experience required and if the job has any educational requirements.

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