Google may issue manual actions over job schema on expired job listings

Google has updated its schema documentation around job postings to explain that if you use job schema on your job listings on your website, and those job listings have actually expired, Google may prevent you from showing job schema in the future. Google said, “[J]obs that are no longer open for applications must be expired in one of the following ways. Failure to take timely action on expired jobs may result in a manual action.”

Manual actions are issued by Google employees when they see your website is not complying with the Google webmaster guidelines. I suspect that if you are using job schema to mark up your job listings, and those jobs are not currently available, Google will remove the ability for your job schema to show up in the search results or in the Google jobs search results.

To remove job listings that are no longer available, Google offers these four options:

• Remove the JobPosting markup from the page.
• Remove the page entirely (so that requesting it returns a 404 or 410 status code).
• Add a noindex meta tag to the page.
• Ensure the validThrough property is populated and in the past.

Here is a screen shot of the page:

Aaron Bradley first spotted this and posted it on Google+.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.