Every Job on My Site Was a Copy

Full job announcements gave the board substance and handed it the aggregator’s curse, my pages now carried the same text as USAJOBS itself and every other site pulling the same feed. Search engines demote duplicate content, and an ad reviewer reading republished text sees exactly that, republished text. This post is the honest fight, including the AI rewrite engine I built, what it genuinely fixes, and what it cannot.

The problem stated without comfort, an aggregator’s value to a visitor, everything in one place, is invisible to a duplicate-content check, which sees only that these paragraphs exist elsewhere first. My response was an AI Rewrite engine inside the plugin, jobs’ raw sections get sent to a language model with instructions to rewrite into original phrasing while preserving every fact, and the rewritten body replaces the republished one:

function jab_ai_rewrite($title, $raw_html) {
    $s = get_option('jab_settings', array());
    $response = wp_remote_post('https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages', array(
        'timeout' => 60,
        'headers' => array(
            'x-api-key'         => $s['ai_key'],
            'anthropic-version' => '2023-06-01',
            'content-type'      => 'application/json',
        ),
        'body' => wp_json_encode(array(
            'model'      => $s['ai_model'],
            'max_tokens' => 2000,
            'messages'   => array(array(
                'role'    => 'user',
                'content' => 'Rewrite this job posting in original wording. '
                    . 'Preserve every fact, figure, requirement and date exactly. '
                    . 'Do not add claims. Title: ' . $title . ' Content: ' . $raw_html,
            )),
        )),
    ));
    // decode, validate, and return the rewritten HTML or false on failure
}

The prompt’s constraints are the ethics of the feature, preserve every fact, add nothing, because a rewrite that invents requirements or shifts a salary is worse than duplication, it is misinformation about someone’s livelihood. Rewrites run as a reviewed batch tool, not silently on import, and failures fall back to the original text rather than publishing a half-response.

Now the honesty this series owes, learned through this site’s own ad rejections. Rewriting helps the text-similarity problem, and it does not transform an aggregator into an original publication, reviewers and algorithms weigh the site’s overall nature, and a board of restated announcements is still a board of announcements. The strategy that actually moved the needle was additive, original articles, real guides on federal hiring written for this site alone, giving the domain content that exists nowhere else, with the rewritten listings as the useful database beneath rather than the whole identity. Rewriting is a mitigation, original work is the cure, and pretending otherwise would have cost me months more than admitting it did.

A few things people ask me about this

Is AI-rewritten content safe for SEO and ads? Safer than verbatim republication, and not equivalent to original work. Reviewers weigh the site’s nature, use rewriting to reduce similarity and original articles to give the domain content that exists nowhere else.

What must a rewrite prompt for factual content forbid? Additions and drift. Require every fact, number, requirement, and date preserved exactly, and validate or discard responses, a fabricated qualification in a job post is misinformation, not paraphrase.

Next

Growth added settings pages, and with them arrived the project’s most instructive bug, saving any one settings page silently erased the others. That architecture flaw is the next post.