As you know, in May, Google began rolling out a job search feature in Google Search. Shortly after, they announced the job posting schema which was being tested for some time. In short, this feature allows you to search Google for [jobs] or specific types of jobs or location of jobs and get job listings directly in the search results.
Google's webmaster team, specifically Mariya Moeva from Google, has just posted a new FAQ around this feature. This is tailored for webmasters and how they can get their job listings to show up in the search results. Here is the FAQs:
Q: Why aren’t my jobs appearing in this feature?
As with any other structured markup feature in Search, having markup doesn’t guarantee appearing in the Search results. To debug any issues that are related to the markup implementation go through the following:
- Validate the markup in the Structured Data Testing Tool.
- Check that your sitemap has been crawled and does not contain any errors. Sitemaps need to be accurate and correct in order to be processed.
- Go through your Rich Card Report in Search Console to check if there are any potential issues with your markup.
Q: How do I check how many jobs are indexed?
Use the Rich Cards Report within Search Console.
Q: Should we put the markup on the canonical or mobile page?
Markup should be placed on all pages and not just the canonical link.
Q: Can we include markup on our job listing pages?
No, job listing pages should not reference any job posting markup.
Q: Can we include listing pages on our sitemap?
We highly recommend that only job leaf pages are included in the sitemap. If there are job listing pages in your sitemap, please ensure that there is no job postings markup included on these pages.
Q: What does the ISO 8601 format look like for the
The format for date times must follow the following convention:
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss±hh:mm
Example:
2017-06-15T16:16:16+00:00
Q: Can we append our URLs with a tag or special attribution parameters?
No. Only canonical links should be provided.
Q: Can two markup formats (e.g. JSON and Microdata) be used simultaneously on the same page?
Although both formats are equally accepted, we prefer that only one format is used within each page to prevent any conflicting information between markup blocks. That being said, our team does prefer that the markup is implemented in JSON.
Q: Should we simply remove a sitemap from a sitemap index file as soon as there are no valid job posting URLs available?
It is best that initially we are provided an empty sitemap file prior to removing references to the sitemap from your sitemap index file. This way, once we receive the next ping of your sitemap index we are able to properly detect markup removals for job posting pages. Once this has been done, the empty sitemap file can be removed from the index the following day.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
