A good community has your back. They want you to succeed and will help make your success a reality. Being part of a good community is a wonderful thing–it’s empowering, rewarding, and humbling all at once. That’s exactly what we’ve experienced while building the latest update for The Events Calendar. This release is packed with SEO improvements made possible thanks to input from Joost de Valk, the creator of the Yoast SEO plugin and an influential figure in the WordPress space.

Joost generously took the time to highlight several SEO issues he noticed, create video walk-throughs, and collaborate with our developers to address them. Today, we’re excited to share those improvements with you and show how they’ll boost your event website’s performance.

The Event Calendar’s new SEO improvements

There are four areas of improvement we’ve tackled in this update:

1. Showing a 404 header for Month, Day, and Week Views when there are no events.
2. How we handle caching and no-index in the calendar’s Month and Week Views.
3. Using WordPress’ default Robots Head meta tag instead of adding our own.
4. Correcting how the Month and Week View title tags are displayed on initial page load.

If that sounds super technical and over your head, don’t worry! In the sections below we’ll explain each issue in simple terms and how fixing it has improved the plugin and your website.

Adding 404 header for empty Month, Day, and Week Views

Problem: Let’s say I’ve been running my events calendar for about a year. The first event on my calendar is January 1, 2024. The last event on my calendar (the one I have published furthest out into the future) is on July 4th, 2025. If a user is navigating my calendar by pressing the “next” or “previous” date options, they won’t be able to navigate prior to January 1, 2025 or past July 4th, 2025. Let’s call this your calendar’s “active” date range. To the average user, it seems like that’s where the calendar content ends.

What Joost discovered however, is that if someone creates and uses a direct link to say, January 1, 1900, not only is that page generated but so are all the pages for dates between January 1, 1900 and January 1, 2024! The same was true for dates out into the future. Pages were also being generated for disabled or empty views if a direct link was used to get there. That’s a LOT of pages with nothing on them being crawled by search engines!

Solution: Our team made sure we now send 404 headers on views outside your calendar’s “active” date range or when a view is disabled.

Benefit: Sending a 404 signals to search engines that no valid content exists for that URL, preventing Google from wasting crawl budget on non-existent pages. This helps ensure only valid pages get indexed, keeping your search results relevant.

Caching and no-index in Month and Week Views

Problem: Users experience your event calendar through Views, such as List, Month, Day, etc. If I’m viewing your calendar in Month View and browse from January to February, I’ve technically just gone between two pages of your website, even if it doesn’t look like it.

Any time a page within a View has no events, that page should be “noindex-ed”, meaning a noindex tag is added to it so that search engines will not index that page. This is a good thing. You only want the most relevant and valuable pages on your site indexed, not pages without content. However, when caching was enabled for Month View in Events > Settings > General > Viewing, pages that shouldn’t have been indexed still were (on both Month and Week Views), potentially harming the overall SEO of your site by allowing search engines to index low-value, low-relevancy pages.

Solution: Our team added a new hook that fires before cached content is found so that it always checks for noindex.

Benefit: Proper implementation of both caching and noindex tags is a big win for your site’s SEO. Caching helps to speed up your website while noindex-ing helps search engines focus on the most important content your site has to offer.

Filtering Robots Head meta tag

Problem: By default, when an events calendar page was cached, a robots meta tag was added by The Events Calendar plugin. The robots meta tag is important because it instructs search engines on how to handle specific web pages. In this instance, event pages. The problem Joost found is that each of these pages actually had two robots meta tags–one from us and one from WordPress core.

Solution: Our team utilized the wp_robots filter to modify noindex from WordPress core instead of adding our own tag.

Benefit: Having two different <meta name=”robots”> tags sends mixed signals to search engines, which can lead to incorrect handling of your pages. This fix ensures search engines are getting a single, clear signal.

Fixing Month and Week View title tags

Problem: Depending on how you had your Events plugin configured you could end up with bad <title> tags on certain month view archive pages, which is less than ideal cause it would make the Month View pages appear to have different content than it actually does.

Solution: We now use the correct method to determine the title, ensuring all views are correctly displayed.

Benefit: This fix improves your site visitors’ user experience and the SEO discoverability of affected pages.

Even more improvements and new features are on their way!

Whether we’re addressing feedback from our amazing community or innovating internally, we’re always hard at work making the entire Events Calendar Suite better. In the coming weeks and months we’ve got a lot of new features coming that we’re sure you’ll love. Stay tuned to learn more!

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By

Nathan

Nathan is the Product Marketing Manager here at The Events Calendar. He also has a wealth of experience planning and hosting events for communities in the WordPress space, various non-profits, and independent groups.

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