Is Google Removing the Full Job Description from Google Jobs?
This can be a considerable organic traffic upside for job boards!
Google might have removed the full job description from Google Jobs!
What has changed in Google Jobs in Europe today?
I was looking at Google Jobs as part of my usual audits and noticed there is no way to get the full job description displayed on the job ad page that Google generates.
We only see something called a "Job Preview" now, and there is no way to access the full job description:
As a comparison, here is what the usual experience looked like just a few days ago:
Notice the "Show Full Description" button. It is used to expand and load the entire page.
As an additional comparison, here is what the US version of Google Jobs looks like at the moment:
Notice how different it looks? It has the full job description and something called "Job Highlights" - an extracted part of the text that Google started adding a few years ago. We never saw this in Europe, though.
Did you also notice how the sources of the jobs are now shown with some nice little icons? This is also new and looks great. I am sure it is also fantastic for brand traffic.
It looks very similar to how we used to see the "Find jobs on" section that got deprecated in the last update:
What does this latest change mean for Job Boards and Aggregators?
Well, in most simple terms, candidates will have to go to the job source to read the full job description.
This will drive traffic to job boards and aggregators ranking well on Google Jobs, because users cannot see the full job description anymore.
Great news for anyone doing Google Jobs optimization. You are about to see A LOT of traffic!
Why is Google doing this?
Well, there is only one reason - the legal case JobIndex started against Google. I wrote extensively about this topic:
Alexander Chukovski
I have also covered it when it became clear that Google will kill the sponsored job ads product:
Part of this claim was that Google had copied job advertisements without permission, thus breaching the copyright and the Marketing Act.
By not showing the full job description, they are one step safer against being labeled as "stealing jobs" and breaking copyright issues (yeah, right, as if job descriptions can be considered copyright material).
Is this change final?
Well, we don't know that for sure. I can only say that I can reproduce this without problems in Germany and a few other countries.
I will monitor this and update the article if I see any further changes.
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