3

Working on a website that also has a job board, and over 4000 active job ads. All of these ads are listed on a single "job board" page, and not linked to from anywhere else. Both Ahrefs and SEMRush are thus listing all of these job ad pages as orphans.

How much of a red flag are these orphan pages? Do sites like Indeed have this same issue? Their job ads are completely dynamic, how are these pages indexed?

What is the best way to solve this issue? Create a job category page and link to each individual job ad from there? Any simpler and perhaps more obvious solutions? What does the website structure need to be like for the problem to be solved?

Stephen Ostermiller
  • 98,758
  • 18
  • 137
  • 361
Michael
  • 41
  • 2
  • Orphan pages isn't your only problem. Job boards have the same problem that classifieds sites have: the content expires and stale pages aren't very SEO friendly. See How should short-lived expired pages be handled for SEO? – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 15 '21 at 23:08
  • One thing that can help crawlability is to have a sidebar that links to related jobs, much like the related posts sidebar here on Stack Exchange. Then when a search engine crawler finds one of your job pages, the related posts section will give it gentle encouragement to crawl a few more, and from that job crawl a few more, etc... – Maximillian Laumeister Nov 16 '21 at 00:08
  • Hi @Stephen,

    Thanks for your reply - we are actually able to solve that issue with Google’s API, so expired pages won’t be an issue for us, but thanks for pointing that out as well!

     – Michael Nov 16 '21 at 14:42
  • Hi @Maximillian,

    Thanks for the advice, I’m not sure that would solve the entire problem though, as not all job ads will show up in this related section, so chances are some of them will remain orphans. Worth looking into for sure, appreciate the input!

     – Michael Nov 16 '21 at 14:43

0 Answers0