Google updated their job posting structured data guidance in order to change the requirements of how to best keep Google notified of new webpages and changes to existing webpages.
Google Job Posting Structured Data Guidance
Google’s job posting structured data guidance is designed to help publishers become eligible for 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 job posting structured data.
Of particular importance is the ability to notify Google of new job posting webpages and changes to existing pages, which benefits publishers by having the most relevant and useful job postings available in the SERPs.
Changes In The Guidance For Notifying Google
The change in the guidance was to clarify how publishers can notify Google of changes and new webpages. There doesn’t seem to be a change in the guidance of what to do but rather there is a change in how the use of sitemaps is emphasized and encouraged.
In the previous version of the guidance Google encouraged users to rely on the Indexing API “instead of sitemaps” to directly notify Google of pages that need immediate crawling.
The previous guidance stated:
“Keep Google informed by doing one of the following actions:
For job posting URLs, we recommend using the Indexing API instead of sitemaps because the Indexing API prompts Googlebot to crawl your page sooner than updating the sitemap and pinging Google. However, we still recommend submitting a sitemap for coverage of 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 fixes the appearance of a conflict between the two sentences by replacing the phrase “instead of” with the word “and”.
It now reads:
“Keep Google informed by using the Indexing API and submitting a sitemap. For job posting URLs, we recommend using the Indexing API instead of sitemaps because the Indexing API prompts Googlebot to crawl your page sooner. Use the Indexing API to notify Google of a new URL to crawl or that content at a URL has been updated.”
The updated guidance now recommends using both the Indexing API and a sitemap, while clarifying that the Indexing API is faster.
There are similar changes to two more passages further down the page in addition to removing all mentions of “pinging” Google about changes to the sitemap with a GET request.
This statement:
“Keep Google informed by doing one of the following actions:”
Was changed to this:
“Keep Google informed of changes:”
That change makes it clearer that publishers should still use a sitemap while also recommending the use of the Indexing API for fast crawling.
Google also removed the recommendation to use a GET request for getting the sitemap crawled from the guidance:
“If you’re not using the Indexing API, submit a new sitemap to Google by sending a GET request to the following URL:
https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml”
Read the updated Job Posting Structured Data guidance here:
Job posting (JobPosting) structured data for Job Search
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