When one thing leads to another . . .
As a developer it’s not unusual that, as you work on a major project, you stumble over a smaller but really useful product. This has been the story of our new Google Indexing API for WP Job Manager Plugin.
After many hours of head-scratching, debugging and deciphering of Google’s documentation, I finally got the Google Indexing API working for Matador Jobs
(the WordPress Job Board Plugin for Bullhorn ATS) early this year. It was a key feature in our biggest Matador update to date (Matador Jobs Major release 3.4.0).
This apparently relatively small feature addition has proved extremely useful in improving our clients page ranking and in getting their jobs listed in near real-time on Google Jobs Search.
It wasn’t much of a leap to realize that this functionality could be useful for other job-boards. As we already have a Matador add-on to provide WP Job Manager integration, we decided to wrap the relevant fragment of the code we developed for Matador into a dedicated Plugin for users WP Job Manager. Launched at the beginning of April 2019, the Google Indexing API for WP Job Manager Plugin is my second Premium Plugin.
How the Google Indexing API for WP Job Manager Plugin works
Google created its Indexing API so that Google Jobs can be informed immediately when a job is posted or removed from a job board.
The API allows you to PUSH notifications that you have published a new job or deleted a filled job so that Google adds/removes your jobs straight away.
By making use of this, when you post a job it is included in the Google Job Search results almost instantly, giving you an important advantage.
Similarly, filled jobs are removed promptly and are no longer indexed in Google. So job-seekers should never end up on a 404 page.
When you implement the Google Indexing API for WP Job Manager Plugin, you don’t have to wait for Google to get around to crawling your site and add your jobs to their job search index. It happens automatically then and there.
