We created a section on our website where we post available developers. Each developer has a separate page with a summary plus it is possible to download their CVs. There is a search where you can filter CVs. Once a developer is hired we mark this CV as ‘hired’. Since that moment you can’t filter it in our search.
At that, the page is still available if you have the link. However, I noticed that it is out of index after that moment.
Sure, these pages may be a great resource for our traffic. What can we do to change this?
Presumably you’ve already checked that nothing is adding a “noindex” robots meta tag to these pages. I can’t think what else would cause this. Google doesn’t guarantee to index all pages, but it seems strange it would suddenly cease to include one like this.
Have I understood correctly that you also have a Google search on your site, and it’s behaving in the same way? It might be better to move this topic to General Web Development, and see if anybody there has any ideas. Let us know if you would like it moved.
I hope I got your question right, but the Hired developer page is indexed by Google. If you query the same URL with site: operator you should see it indexed.
@itvaleria, I’m assuming the only way one could see the Hired developers was if they had the original URL in the first place right? If this is indeed the case, you must understand that you’re breaking the navigation here. If there’s no way a user can navigate to it, or if it is gated (say only logged in users can see it), you’re bound to get low or no traffic on it.
Also, from SEO perspective, the Hired URLs are not really different than the Non-hired pages except for the Hired stamp there, which doesn’t have any meaning for a search engine. So they might be crawled and indexed by Google but you must specify in some way, why Google or other search engines should love these Hired pages more than the non-hired one (again assuming that’s what you want).
May I suggest you consider improving the page’s content too. You may add more details about the Projects the developer has worked upon, adding the functionality to add profile images, ratings and reviews, links to any previous publications or other contribution etc.
It might seem a big ask, but when you add all those nitty gritty details to a developer’s profile, it will add quality and hopefully unique content to those pages, which is what search engines love.
