A few years ago I had the pleasure of briefly working for an amazing startup “job board.” They are a niche job posting site focusing on high-end analytics jobs. I truly enjoyed my brief stint with the company. I joined this company with aspirations of expanding my skillset with a focus on sales. While I was moderately successful in helping the company achieve their sales numbers, I found myself being more useful offering ideas on SEO and marketing. After about half a year, I came to terms with the fact that I would never be truly comfortable cold-calling and smile and dialing and parted ways with the company.
Although my stint with this company was brief, I was and am lucky enough to call all the employees and owners my friends. To this day, I still assist the founders from time to time with recommendations and strategy to help point them in the right direction.
That’s just a little back story to the real reason I am posting today. My friend shot me a message with a unique issue that I honestly found very intriguing. This board has hundreds of recruiters and business posting jobs on their board at a time. After each position is filled, it must be taken down, and the page must be expired. What is the best way to handle the pages once they expire? Do you take them down with a 404, 301, or a custom this job has been filled page? I highly recommended avoiding the 404. I think that is the worst way to handle the response. I am also a little finicky about the 301 redirect, but this was my first thought. The final thought was to create a new page saying something like “this job is filled, but please check out the following similar jobs” and post a table with current similar jobs on the site.
I am not sure how this current Exercise will play out, but I am still researching some other methods and plan to suggest some more A/B testing, but it is obvious that their rankings are hurting. They also may have gotten a little grief from the google #panda / #farmer update. Which is also unfortunate because they’re not scraping content, all jobs are posted by companies, recruiters, or representatives. Needless to say, this is my first post with more questions than advice. I will post again next month with results from these events.