Backlinks for Career Sites That Search Engines Trust With Livelihoods

Google's guidelines for its search quality raters give extra weight to topics that can affect a person's financial stability, and job searching, pay and career changes sit squarely in that territory. For career sites, the bar for trust is higher than it is for a hobby blog. The pages that rank tend to show who wrote them, why that person knows, and where the facts came from.

That changes the job a link has to do. A link from a respected HR publication or a professional association tells search engines that people who understand employment consider your page reliable. A link from a general blog that will publish anything about "career success" tells them very little.

• Expert authorship. Career guides written or reviewed by recruiters, coaches or HR professionals, named on the page.
• Sourced facts. Pay, hiring and labour figures attributed to where they came from.
• Outlets employers read. Links from the publications that hiring managers, not only job seekers, trust.

Nearly every career site publishes interview tips, and very few publish numbers. Reporters, HR writers and career centres all need fresh figures they can attribute, and a site that supplies them gets quoted as a source instead of adding one more opinion.

Data a career site can produce

• Platform data. What appears most in postings on your board, how long roles stay open, which locations are hiring in your specialism.
• Surveys of your users. What job seekers say about interviews, offers, flexibility or switching fields.
• Salary snapshots. Pay ranges from postings or user reports, published with a clear method and sample.
• Annual reports. One recurring study that writers come to expect each year earns links year after year.

Pay and benefits content sits close to personal finance, where the standards are stricter still, and our page on finance site backlinks explains those rules. Whatever you publish, the method has to be stated plainly, because a career statistic that falls apart under a reporter's question does more harm to your reputation than the coverage was worth.

Career sites have their own ways to waste good links. A job board full of expired listings sends its hard-won authority into pages that no longer help anyone. Google's documentation for job posting markup asks sites to remove or update expired jobs, and job seekers who land on dead listings leave quickly.

Scraped job feeds are the second trap. A board that republishes the same listings as every other aggregator has thin pages, and links pointed at it prop up content search engines already see elsewhere. Then there are the career advice guest post farms: sites that publish any article on "success" or "productivity" for a fee and link out to anything. David's rule rules them out: no spammy sites, and nothing unrelated to the careers business we are building links for.

Anchors need the same care. Career anchors should mostly be your brand, your tool's name and plain descriptions of the page, with job titles and locations appearing because a writer used them. A profile where dozens of links say "best resume builder" reads as placed, and we keep it from drifting that way.