I wanted Google’s Indexing API to be the cheat code for job boards. The equation was simply:
- New job goes live? Push it to Google.
- Job gets updated? Notify Google.
- Job expires? Tell Google to drop it.
For any job board owner, that sounds incredible, especially considering job postings are not evergreen assets. They are short-lived, high-churn pages that need to be discovered and removed quickly. If Google is slow to crawl a job URL, the opportunity may already be gone by the time the page gets indexed.
So when Google offers an API that appears to let you notify them directly when job pages are created, updated, or deleted, it’s exactly the tool that hits “mandatory” status for job board owners.
That was my assumption, too.
Then I spent hours reviewing the documentation, testing server responses, checking quota limits, and comparing what Google says the API does with what most SEOs probably assume it does.
The conclusion?
The API is not useless. That would actually be easier to write about.
It is worse than that. It works just well enough to make you think you accomplished something. But 90% of you using this tool (legitimately or not) aren’t getting what you THINK you are.
This week’s newsletter gets a little long. Go straight to the free tool to determine if your job indexing API is working the way you think it is.
What Google’s Web Indexing API actually does
Google’s Indexing API lets site owners notify Google when certain pages are added, updated, or removed. But this is not a general-purpose indexing API for every URL on your website.
Google says the API can only be used for pages with JobPosting structured data or livestream pages using BroadcastEvent embedded inside a VideoObject. In other words, this is not for blog posts, category pages, location pages, service pages, product pages, or any other URL you wish Google would crawl faster.
For job boards, the API provides two primary actions.
You can send URL_UPDATED when a job page is new or meaningfully changed. You can send URL_DELETED when a job page has been removed and should be dropped from Google’s index.
That sounds powerful, and to be fair, it can be insanely effective.
The problem is that a successful API response does not mean what many people want it to mean.
It does not mean the URL was indexed. It does not mean the URL appears in Google’s index or in the Google Jobs experience. It does not mean the page will generate impressions, clicks, or conversions.
It means Google received your notification.
That’s it.
Job Indexing API default quotas and limits
This is the part that really matters.
Google’s own documentation says that when you send an update request and receive a HTTP 200 response, Google may try to recrawl the URL soon. When you send a delete request and receive a HTTP 200 response, Google may remove the URL from the index.
That word “may” is doing a lot of…
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