SEO for Firefish Recruitment Websites
Marketing Leads at high-growth agencies often love the Firefish platform for its candidate engagement tools but struggle with its technical footprint as they scale. The issue is rarely the content, but rather "index bloat" - the thousands of expired job pages that linger on the site, generating 404 errors and wasting crawl budget.
We act as the technical partners who configure your Firefish backend to automate 301 redirects, clean up your sitemaps, and ensure that search engines focus purely on your live, revenue-generating roles.
Key Takeaways
- Expired Job Management: Success requires automating the handling of closed roles - using 301 redirects or 410 status codes - to prevent thousands of "dead" pages from dragging down site health.
- Crawl Budget Efficiency: We configure sitemaps to exclude expired content, ensuring Google spends its limited resources indexing your new, live jobs faster.
- Internal Link Hygiene: Strategies must remove links to closed jobs from category pages and "related roles" widgets to prevent users and bots from hitting dead ends.
- Native Feature Tuning: We leverage Firefish's built-in SEO tools for meta data and schema, fine-tuning them beyond default settings to maximise click-through rates.
- Growth Scalability: Proper configuration prevents the technical debt that often accumulates during rapid growth phases, ensuring your site remains fast and indexable as you add volume.
Why Expired Job Management Matters for Firefish SEO
Index Bloat, 404s, and Crawl Waste on Growing Job Sites
Index bloat, 404s, and crawl waste on growing job sites matter because they dilute the authority of your live pages. When a search engine crawler visits your site and encounters 5,000 expired job URLs for every 50 live ones, it signals a low-quality, poorly maintained domain. This "noise" forces Google to waste its crawl budget on dead content, delaying the indexation of your new vacancies. By implementing strict expiry rules, we channel 100% of the crawler's attention to the pages that make you money.
Configuring Firefish for Clean Indexation
Automating 301 Redirects and Handling Expired Job URLs
Automating 301 redirects and handling expired job URLs involves configuring the Firefish CMS to redirect closed roles to their most relevant parent category. Instead of serving a generic "404 Not Found" error, an expired "Java Developer" job should redirect to the "Java Jobs" listing page. This retains the SEO value (backlinks and history) of the old URL and passes it to your live category page, boosting its ranking power over time.
Maintaining Sitemaps and Internal Links for Live Roles
Maintaining sitemaps and internal links for live roles ensures that your site architecture remains fluid and accurate. We audit your XML sitemap settings to ensure that expired jobs are removed immediately upon closure. Simultaneously, we adjust your internal linking modules (e.g., "Similar Jobs") to ensure they never point to dead URLs. This keeps the user journey fluid and prevents the "soft 404" errors that frustrate both candidates and search algorithms.
Using Firefish Native SEO Features Effectively
Metadata, Schema, and Job Distribution Settings
Metadata, schema, and job distribution settings must be tuned to target specific commercial keywords rather than generic defaults. Firefish offers robust native SEO fields, but they are often left blank or auto-filled with weak data. We manually optimise your static page metadata and configure dynamic rules for job posts - ensuring structured data (JobPosting schema) includes salary, location, and employment type. This maximises your visibility in the Google for Jobs widget, driving higher organic click-through rates.
How We Optimise Firefish Recruitment Websites
We do not just report errors; we implement the fixes that allow your site to scale.
1. Index Bloat Audit
We conduct a full crawl of your site to identify the scale of your "zombie pages" - expired jobs, 404s, and low-value parameters that are currently indexed.
2. Redirect Logic Implementation
We configure the Firefish backend to handle expired jobs intelligently, automating 301 redirects to relevant categories to preserve link equity.
3. Sitemap Hygiene
We clean your XML sitemaps to ensure they only submit live, high-value pages to Google, optimising your crawl budget.
4. Schema & Meta Tuning
We fine-tune your native SEO settings, rewriting meta descriptions and validating schema markup to ensure you dominate rich snippets.
FAQs on Firefish SEO
How do I improve SEO on a Firefish website?
Start by controlling index bloat from expired jobs. Then, refine your metadata, clean up your sitemaps, and ensure internal links focus primarily on live roles and key service pages.
Why are 404 errors a problem for Firefish SEO?
Large numbers of 404s waste crawl budget and signal a poorly maintained site to search engines. This can hurt the rankings of your live pages and reduce overall domain authority.
How should Firefish handle expired job pages?
Best practice is to 301 redirect them to relevant category or search pages. This keeps the user on your site and passes any accumulated SEO value to your live listings.
Can Firefish support good technical SEO?
Yes, Firefish is a powerful platform, but it requires careful configuration of URLs, redirects, sitemaps, and metadata to perform at its best.
How do you measure SEO success for Firefish sites?
We track the reduction in 404 errors, the growth in organic traffic to live job pages, and the increase in candidate applications generated from organic search.
Book Your Strategy Review
Ensure your Firefish site is driving growth, not errors. Contact our team for a Firefish SEO Health Check today.
