Google publishes new FAQ on job search postings for webmasters

Mariya Moeva from Google posted a new and helpful frequently asked questions document in the webmaster help forums around the new job search functions in Google.

Google is encouraging webmasters to mark up their job listings so that Google can show them in web search for job-related queries. Yesterday, Google published this helpful FAQ around this topic.

Here is a copy of the FAQs for job search postings for webmasters:

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, 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 strongly recommend that only job leaf pages are included in the sitemap. If there are job listing pages in your sitemap, please ensure that no job postings markup is included on these pages.

Q: What does the ISO 8601 format look like for the tag in the sitemap? 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.

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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.