Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog

Jobberbase [www.jobberbase.com] is a rather powerful jobs board software which we’ve been testing on jobsinireland.org for the last year or so. Overall it has become a rather mature and stable software, offering the ability for companies to post open jobs.
Aside : In fact, if your company doesn’t already have a career portal on your website, this software would be a great way to avoid recruiters. In the business of hiring, recruiters & agents have gotten a bad reputation for either being too expensive or for simply wasting employers time. With jobberbase you could have your HR staff post jobs openings directly on your website, and candidate could apply directly to you. With recuiter fees being in the thousands of Euros for a successful new hire, having your own jobs board could be a real money saver.

Some issues with jobberbase

Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or  perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)

Jobberbase custom homepage footer

• copy the file /_templates/default/footer.tpl to /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl to add in more navigational links or text.
• edit the file /_templates/default/index.tpl and change the last line from

{include file="footer.tpl"}
to
{include file="footer-home.tpl"}

Jobberbase proper error page handling

• copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file

{php}
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
{/php}

• edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from

{include file="header.tpl"}

to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}

Advertise your open jobs

And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org