Event Calendar Listings in Google

[Linda]

Hi

I previously contacted you regarding the way google lists the events – see my previous post here: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/event-listings-in-google/

I did as suggested, I removed the ‘Upcoming Events’ widget from the side column on my site and yes Google did start listing the events correctly, so for example the May events category was showing the first three events in May, and so on.

When I reinstated the widget earlier this week I’ve noticed that Google has reverted back to showing the next three current events, regardless of the event category.

Any suggestions as to how I can get Google to show the correct information? I still want to maintain the widget on my site but would like Google to take the information from the calendar itself not the widget. I have categories for every month and the majority of my search engine traffic comes from people looking for events for a typical month. Therefore it would be nice that if someone wants to know ‘whats on in may’ they get the first three events of May showing, not what’s on in the next day or so.

I’d really appreciate any help or assistance you can give. Many thanks in advance.

[Geoff]

Hello Linda! Nice to see you again.

I’m glad removing the widget from the sidebar initially helped the search listings display correctly. I know it would preferable to keep the widget in the sidebar. I can try to offer some suggestions here, but I can’t guarantee anything that I will be able to solve this completely. We’ll take it as far as we can. 🙂

One idea would be to add a “nofollow” on the widget links. Adding rel=”nofollow” tells the Googlebot to not attempt to follow the link which de-prioritizes it on the page. Google does a good job explaining how this works.

To do this, you will need to override and customize the widget template, which is located at /plugins/events-calendar-pro/views/pro/widgets/modules/single-event.php.

• Make a copy of this file
• Create a new folder in your theme folder called tribe-events
• Create a new folder in there called pro
• Create a new folder in there called widgets
• Create a new folder in there called modules
• Drop your copied file in that last folder.

Once the file is in your theme, you can start customizing it. In this case, change line 54:

<a href="<?php echo tribe_get_event_link(); ?>" rel="bookmark"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

…to this:

<a href="<?php echo tribe_get_event_link(); ?>" rel="nofollow"><?php the_title(); ?></a>

I hope this helps!

Geoff

[Geoff]

Hi there, Linda! It’s been a couple weeks since we’ve heard from you, so I’m going to go ahead and close this thread. Please do feel free to start a new thread if you still have questions here and we’d be happy to help you out. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

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