Google has updated its job posting structured data guide to change the requirements for how best to keep Google informed of new web pages and changes to existing web pages.
Google Job Posting Structured Data Guide
The Google Job Posting Structured Data Guide is designed to help publishers gain enhanced visibility in Google Search results through interactive job listings in search. It also provides an overview of the process of adding, testing, and maintaining structured job posting data.
Of particular importance is the ability to notify Google of new job posting web pages and changes to existing pages, which benefits publishers by having the most relevant and useful job listings available in the SERPs.
Changes to the Guide for Notifying Google
The change to the guide was to clarify how publishers can notify Google of changes and new web pages. There doesn’t seem to be a change in the instructions on what to do, but rather a change in how the use of sitemaps is emphasized and encouraged.
In the previous version of the guide, Google encouraged users to rely on the indexing API “rather than sitemaps” to notify Google directly of pages that need to be crawled immediately.
The previous guide said:
“Keep Google informed by doing one of the following:
For job posting URLs, we recommend using the indexing API instead of sitemaps because the indexing API asks Googlebot to crawl your page before updating the sitemap and pinging Google. However, we still recommend that you submit a sitemap to cover your entire site.”
The recommendation to use the indexing API “instead of sitemaps” seems to discourage the use of sitemaps, even though the next sentence recommends submitting a sitemap for the entire site.
The updated guidance resolves the appearance of a conflict between the two sentences by replacing the phrase “instead of” with the word “and.”
Now it says:
“Keep Google informed by using the Index API and submitting a sitemap. For job posting URLs, we recommend using the Index API instead of sitemaps because the Index API requires to Googlebot to crawl your page earlier. Use the Indexing API to notify Google of a new URL to crawl or that the content of a URL has been updated.”
The updated guide now recommends using both the indexing API and a sitemap, while clarifying that the indexing API is faster.
There are similar changes two more passages further down the page, as well as removing all mentions of “pinging” Google about sitemap changes with a GET request.
This statement:
“Keep Google informed by doing one of the following:”
Changed to this:
“Keep Google informed of changes:”
This change makes it clearer that publishers should still use a sitemap while recommending the use of the indexing API for fast crawling.
Google also removed the recommendation to use a GET request to crawl the sitemap from the guide:
“If you’re not using the indexing API, submit a new sitemap to Google by sending a GET request to the following URL:
Read the updated guide to structured job posting data here:
Structured job posting data (JobPosting) for job search
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