Duplicate content from recurring events

[Darren]

Hi there,

I’m using Events Calendar Pro, and recurring events. This creates 3 future-dated events for everyone I set up, so for example one for this November, another for November 2016, and another for November 2017.

My issue is that this creates 3 separate pages, with 3 URLs, and 3 lots of content (which are the same). This is terrible for SEO. The canonical URLs set for each page are for that page, which really compounds the issue.

I need to find a resolution to this, and I can only think of 2 ways:

• Set the canonical URL for all recurring events in a series to be the next event in that series. So in my example above, the canonical URL for all 3 events would be to the one for this November.
• Make it so that all events in a series just use the same page, the same URL. All of my events are the same year-on-year, there are no differences between this year, next year, etc. Therefore there is no reason to have separate pages. The calendar can show the same page at any recurring date.

Are either of these 2 scenarios possible?

Thanks for your help!

Darren

[Geoff]

Hi Darren and welcome to the forums! I really hope you’ve been enjoying PRO so far and appreciate your support. 🙂

Good question. SEO comes up quite a bit, especially as it relates to recurring events and duplicated content.

This thread has a good explanation of how The Events Calendar uses it’s own canonical link in place of the one supplied by WordPress. In addition, the plugin generates the proper meta tags to ensure that events posts are indexed separately in search results.

Setting your own canonical link is certainly a possibility. As the the thread mentions, you could unhook the plugin’s action and replace it with your own when wp_head executes.

Another idea is to create the events in a recurring series, then edit them individually to break them out of the series and edit the content accordingly.

Does this help clarify things a bit? Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions and I’d be happy to help as best I can. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Darren]

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for the speedy reply. I’m afraid this doesn’t quite solve the problem.

I’ve read the thread you mention about the canonical link the plugin uses, but it causes my problem because it makes search engines think each page is separate. Also the meta code also ensures each page is separate. This is the opposite of what I want to achieve.

I’m afraid I don’t know how to alter the plugin’s functionality so that it uses the next event’s URL as the canonical for all future events in that series. Is this something you can assist me with?

I’m afraid breaking the content out of its series doesn’t help either. I’d have to re-write all the pages that have “broken out” of the series and that just adds way too much work when we have 100+ recurring events.

I think we’re pretty much left with the canonical URL fix, if that’s at all possible?

Darren

[Geoff]

Hey Darren,

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying!

In that case, I think it would be possible to use the URL of one of the existing events as the canonical URL, though that would take a fair amount of WP Query work to accomplish.

We are actually talking about different ways of handling the /all/ URL in a recurring series, including the possibility of removing duplicated content from the page. That would be ideal in your specific case since /all/ is the default canonical URL for a recurring series. However, that’s something that is merely being discussed at the moment.

It would actually be great if you have a moment and are able to post this to our feature request forum. In fact, we have added features for SEO based on the feedback from this request, so that might be a good one to chime in on.

Sorry I don’t have a concrete solution for you, but does this at least shed some more light on things?

Cheers,
Geoff

[Darren]

I think you’re right, that having the /all/ link display the content from the first in the series and then have all future recurring events form that series use the /all/ URL as canonical would be the best solution in this case. Also an option so that all future events don’t have unique URLs, but only appear in the calendar as future dates would be ideal.

Good to know you’re planning on improving the SEO in future versions, and I look forward to that.

I’ll certainly do as you suggest and post these requests in the feature request area, and hopefully something will come of it.

Thanks for your help,

Darren

[Geoff]

My pleasure and thanks for the feedback! I love coming across use cases for the calendar that might not have been considered or fully accounted for. Cheers!

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