Does The Events Calendar Pro use Structured Data Markup

[Anthony Cordo]

Hello!

Considering launching our region’s event calendar with Events Calendar Pro powering it. It’s very important to us that it’s Google friendly so that events inside the system are able to be picked out by Google and displayed in search results.

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/events

Does this plugin support the structure laid out by Google?

Thanks!
Tony

[George]

Hey Antony!

The Events Calendar and Events Calendar Pro indeed use Structured Data for the events 🙂

Let me know if I can help with anything else!

— George

[Anthony]

Wonderful! Thank you.

[Somer]

We are experiencing that all of our events are showing 7 hours ahead of their scheduled start/end times in the structured data. We thought that perhaps enabling the timezone feature would fix this issue, but the source code still shows 7 hours ahead. Outside of stripping out the tribe structured data to build our own, is there anyone else who has found an easier workaround for this?

Note: we did have the WP configurations set to Los Angeles prior to enabling the timezone feature. No change.

It wouldn’t be a huge deal if it weren’t that many of our events are in the evening, so they display next day on Google results.

[George]

Hey Somer,

I’m sorry you’re having problems here! I don’t have this issue so am wondering if perhaps there’s a code conflict, or if your server’s timezone settings are conflict here or something.

To get started on that, would you mind opening a new thread on these forums with a link back to this one for reference, and the description of your problem that you posted here along with a copy of your system information? Here’s how to share system information → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

This will allow us to tend to your unique issue more efficiently, and save @Somer from some unnecessary email notifications 🙂

Thank you!
George

[phil]

Hi,

I hope it’s okay for me to add a comment related to structured date to this thread.

Google provide a tool here for checking structured data. If you feed the url of The Events Calendar demo into that checker, it produces 270 errors. They all seem to be related to dtstart and location being missing.

[George]

Definitely okay to share that Phil, and thank you for doing so!

One thing to note is that errors on the main month view arise for a number of reasons, because it is not a single event view. The event data is stored in a different way to render the JavaScript popups, for one thing, and for the Demo page specifically, there are indeed some “all-day” events that just have one date and thus might cause issues with the testing tool.

If you go to a Single Event that has its date data all properly filled out, however, then the Structured Data testing tool shouldn’t report any issues.

I hope this information helps!

George

[phil]

Hi George,

Thanks for that. Yes it helps. Presumably Google’s crawlers eventually find their way to each Single Event page and pick up correct markup from there.

[George]

Glad to hear it Phil, thank you for your input in this thread. And just to be clear, I’m not saying that we cannot make any improvements to our handling of structured data! We actually have a few development tickets related to it, so over the next several releases there should hopefully be some improvements for even better compatibility with Google’s standards.

Since your original questions have been addressed here, @Anthony, I’m going to close up this thread for now. If other questions arise, though, don’t hesitate to open a new thread any time! 🙂

Cheers,
George

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