A small Google Gemini experiment conducted by an old guy trying to solve a mundane problem.
I was born in the mid-1970s and currently work alongside tech recruiters, software developers, and generally much younger, tech-savvy colleagues. I only learned a bit of BASIC and Pascal programming in school when keyboards were primarily fixed on top of a typewriter. The only alternative to MS Word at that time was WordPerfect, and we had to take turns using one of the PCs for every five students. When we got our first desktop computer (including an analogue modem) in 1992, I was more interested in games and downloading music from Napster than programming.
Fast-forward thirty-odd years, and here I am, sitting here, trying to figure out why Google doesn’t want to index the jobs posted on our website. The XML sitemap is added correctly to the Search Console, and WP Job Manager is syncing as it should be with our Applicant Tracking System, where the jobs are added. The only difference I notice with our other pages that do get indexed is that no “referring page” is detected. From what I understand, this means that no other webpage mentions the URL of the job post.
In search of a creative solution to tackle problems, I decided to create a dedicated webpage listing all the URLs of our job openings, thus generating a referring page. My knowledge is, however, limited to some basic HTML, but I knew that my good friend Gemini would be able to help with scripting.
First, I created a prompt with my intention:
Hi Gemini, I want to create a script that parses URLs from an xml file and creates an output in html with all the URLs in a list format. Can this be done in JavaScript so I can use it in a WordPress post?
After a couple of tries and tweaks, I ended up with this script:
The only thing left was adding the script to this page and here we go:
Mission accomplished: I have a fix for my referring page issue and, at the same time, another post for our blog section.
