They say news travels fast, and bad news travels faster. That was the case for the Google Panda updates earlier this year. Everyone in the recruitment seo business knew about them because the media went gaga over the story, largely presenting Panda as punishment. Nothing like bad news to get attention.
But how about good news? It doesn’t travel quite so fast, but for those interested in recruiting better there is some to be had. This last week Google announced a major update to its search ranking algorithms to favor fresh content, making your internet searches return more relevant results, especially to time sensitive queries.
This is great news for those in the recruitment businesses looking for a leg up on competition. It’s also great news for job-seekers who are going to find it easier to find real, recently posted jobs.
So, how to take advantage of Google’s freshness update? Well it’s the same as what good seo practitioners have been saying all along. Do frequent updates. Provide great content. Be original. Avoid black hat.
For recruiters and staffing companies however there is more strategic work to be done. It’s no longer sufficient to dump your jobs out to job boards. You need to own your news channel.
Post your jobs real time. From the moment your recruiters enter their jobs into your ATS, job seekers should be seeing those jobs realtime on your public website. Google should be visiting that website regularly using your properly formatted html and properly anchored links to find them. This can only happen if your website is your job board and your job board is connected directly to your ATS via webservice calls that pull that data in directly.
Let’s be clear. If you’re batch posting your jobs to your website, if you’re only syndicating them out to someone else like Indeed or Simply Hired or LinkedIn, if you aren’t making your website the place for the freshest content about jobs in your market, then you’re toast.
The good news is that by becoming a publisher of news, by having original content, the Google Freshness update is a just a harbinger of good things that will start working in your favor.
