Google announces new job posting guidelines & requirements

Google has officially updated its job posting guidelines and says if you violate those guidelines, your site can receive a manual action.

Google has announced new job posting guidelines for job schema. The new guidelines can be read here. They include the requirement to remove expired job listings, as we covered 10 days ago.

In addition to the requirement of removing expired jobs, Google also requires webmasters to place structured data on the job’s detail page and the requirement to ensure that all job details are present in the job description.

Google has posted how to remove a job posting, which says:

To remove a job posting that is no longer available, follow the steps below:

1. Do one of the following actions:
   • Ensure the validThrough property is populated and in the past.
   • Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 or 410 status code).
   • Remove JobPosting structured data from the page.
2. Submit a new sitemap to Google by sending a GET
   request to the following URL:

   http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=location_of_sitemap

   For example:

   http://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

   We ingest the entire sitemap and recrawl the pages with lastmod times that
   are more recent than the last time those pages were crawled.

Google does not want to show job listings to applicants when the job listing is not available. Google said, “[I]t can be very discouraging to discover that the job that they wanted is no longer available.”

The additional two requirements are standard schema and structured data requirements. Often webmasters place schema and structured data on the wrong page. Google wants that markup on the most detailed landing page for that job listing, not on a page with all the job listings. Plus, you want to make sure to include all the information you include in your schema and structured data on the job listing web page. Google said, “[I]f you add salary information to the structured data, then also add it to the job posting. Both salary figures should match.”

Google says if you violate these guidelines, Google “may take manual action against your site and it may not be eligible for display in the jobs experience on Google Search.” If you do get a manual action, Google says you “can submit a reconsideration request to let us know that you have fixed the problem(s) identified in the manual action notification. … If your request is approved, the manual action will be removed from your site or page.”