How to Fix: Valid through date

Valid through date is an important SEO check in the Job Boards category. This is a high-priority SEO issue that should be addressed soon. It has a significant impact on your SEO performance.

What is This Check About?

This check looks at whether your job postings carry a validThrough date in their JobPosting structured data. In plain terms: every job listing you publish is supposed to tell Google the date it stops being open. That single field is what lets Google’s job experience know when to keep showing a role and when to quietly retire it. When the check fails, it means one or more of your postings has no expiry date, has one Google cannot parse, or has one that has already passed.

I treat this as a data-hygiene problem before I treat it as an SEO problem, because that is what it actually is. A job board is only as trustworthy as its freshest listing. The validThrough date is the mechanism that keeps a stale listing from poisoning that trust.

Why Does This Matter for SEO?

Search engines like Google evaluate hundreds of factors when ranking websites. Valid through date is one of these important factors because:

• It affects how search engines crawl and understand your content
• It impacts user experience, which is a key ranking factor
• It can influence your site’s visibility in search results
• Ignoring it may cause your competitors to outrank you

Let me be more concrete than the generic list, because job postings are a special case. Google shows eligible jobs in a dedicated job-search experience, and that experience is unusually strict about freshness. A listing with no validThrough, or one whose date is in the past, is a candidate for being dropped from that experience entirely — not demoted, dropped. And the damage is not confined to the one bad listing. Send Google a run of expired jobs that still claim to be open, and you teach it that your board is not maintained. That reputation is far more expensive to earn back than any single ranking.

There is a candidate-experience cost on top of the crawl cost. Nothing makes a job seeker distrust a site faster than applying for a role that closed three weeks ago. The bounce, the lost application, the “this board is dead” impression — those are real user signals, and they run in exactly the direction you do not want.

How to Check This Issue

You can identify this issue by:

1. Running an SEO audit using the SEO Roadmap tool
2. Manually inspecting your website’s source code and settings
3. Using browser developer tools (F12) to analyze page elements
4. Checking Google Search Console for related warnings or errors

For this specific check I would go straight to the source. Open a live job posting, view source, and search for validThrough in the JSON-LD block. Confirm it exists, confirm it is a real future date, and confirm it is in ISO 8601 format (for example 2026-12-31 or a full timestamp with a timezone). Then paste the URL into Google’s Rich Results Test and read what it reports back — that is Google telling you, in its own words, whether it accepts the field. Search Console’s job-posting enhancement report will surface the same failures at scale once Google has recrawled.

How to Fix This in WordPress

Difficulty Level: EASY – This fix is straightforward and can typically be completed by anyone with basic WordPress knowledge.

Estimated Time: 10 min

Follow these steps to fix this issue:

Step 1: Identify Affected Pages

First, run a complete SEO audit to identify all pages affected by this issue. The SEO Roadmap tool will show you exactly which URLs need attention. Sort them into two piles as you go: postings that are genuinely still open and just missing the date, and postings that are actually expired. Those two piles get opposite fixes, and mixing them up is the most common way this gets done wrong.

Step 2: Access WordPress Settings

Log into your WordPress admin dashboard. Depending on the specific issue, you may need to navigate to:

• Settings → General for site-wide configurations
• Settings → Reading for indexing and visibility settings
• Settings → Permalinks for URL structure issues
• Appearance → Theme Editor for template-level fixes
• Plugins → Installed Plugins to configure SEO plugins

For a job board, the field almost always lives in whatever plugin renders your JobPosting schema — WP Job Manager, a Yoast/Rank Math job add-on, or a custom post type feeding an ACF field. That is where the expiry date is set, and where a missing one has to be fixed.

Step 3: Apply the Fix

Make the necessary changes based on the specific issue. If you’re using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, many of these settings can be configured through the plugin’s interface. For the open-but-undated postings, set a real expiry date on each and confirm it flows into the validThrough field in the output. For the expired ones, the correct move is not to leave them live with an old date — it is to close the posting properly. Google’s guidance is to either remove the page (410 or 404), mark the role closed on the page, or update the structured data to reflect that it is no longer available. A closed job that still renders as an open JobPosting is worse than one that returns a clean 410.

Step 4: Verify the Fix

After making changes:

1. Clear your WordPress cache if you’re using a caching plugin
2. Re-run the SEO Roadmap audit to confirm the issue is resolved
3. Check Google Search Console after a few days to ensure Google has recognized the fix

Stop fixing this by hand: automate the expiry

Here is the part the generic advice skips, and the part I would actually spend my time on. Fixing today’s failed listings is a one-afternoon job. Making sure the failure never comes back is the real work, and it is a workflow problem, not an SEO problem. If a human being has to remember to close each job on the right day, the field will drift out of date again within a quarter. It always does.

So build the expiry in. Make the “valid through” date a required field on your job post type, so a listing cannot be published without one. Set a sensible default — thirty or sixty days out — so nobody ships a role with no end in sight. Then schedule the close: a WP-Cron task that runs daily, finds any posting whose validThrough date has passed, and automatically transitions it to a closed state that returns the right response and updates the schema. WP Job Manager and most serious job-board plugins have this behaviour built in or one setting away; if you rolled your own, it is a short cron function. Do this once and the check you are reading about stops appearing in your audits for good. That is the difference between fixing a symptom and closing the hole.

Recommended Tools & Plugins

These tools can help you fix and prevent this issue:

• Yoast SEO – Comprehensive SEO plugin with built-in checks
• Rank Math – Feature-rich SEO plugin with detailed analysis
• Google Search Console – Free tool to monitor your site’s search presence
• SEO Roadmap – Complete SEO audit and action plan tool

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Making changes without testing in a staging environment first
• Ignoring the issue because it seems minor
• Applying fixes to production without proper backup
• Not verifying the fix was successful after implementation

One more that is specific to this check and catches people constantly: setting the validThrough date to the day the job was posted instead of the day it closes. An expiry date in the past is arguably worse than none at all, because it tells Google the role is dead on arrival. Always look forward, never backward, and always use an unambiguous ISO date so there is no month/day confusion between your server, your editors, and Google.

Need More Help?

If you’re still having trouble fixing this issue, consider:

• Consulting with a WordPress developer or SEO specialist
• Checking the WordPress support forums for similar issues
• Reviewing your theme and plugin documentation
• Running a complete site audit with SEO Roadmap for a prioritized action plan

This guide is part of the SEO Roadmap knowledge base – your complete resource for WordPress SEO optimization.