Linkedin seem to be making changes to the Public Profiles. They have recently released paid for Premium profiles however it seems that for may profiles, free and paid for, there is now a new format being rolled out. This has implications for Recruiters who use Google x-ray search to find profiles as the information and format is changing.

The new format is more than just a stylistic change, it contains different information to the old format and is laid out differently with different labels. For example, with the old format the past employment details followed the word Past. With the new format the keyword has changed to Present.

It seems that this new format is being rolled out for the Premium profiles but also many other free profiles. I found this a few weeks ago and strangely some of the changed profiles I found then are now back to the old format.

I have not found any examples of Google caching the new format however. For many LinkedIn profiles, old and new, Google does not provide a link to its cached page, ie. the page that Google actually indexes. In circumstances where Google does links to this cache it appears that it is the old format that is available. I have seen this for both old and new style formats although given the short time this new format has been around it may simply be due to the Google having a old index of the page.

If anyone can explain more about what is happening here, I'd be interested to know more. If your public profile has changed, did you do anything to make this happen?

Shane
Intelligence Software
http://www.intel-sw.com
http://www.twitter.com/1ntelligence