Google upcoming events time error

[birchmere]

We used to have our events listed as all day, all shows start at 7:30pm but since they’re concerts with no set end time it was just easier to put it in text that show started at 7:30 and leave it as all day, but then we discovered that if you search Google for our Upcoming events (searching The Birchmere Upcoming Events) that the search showed our events at the top of the page as all starting at 12am, so I started adding start and end times as 7:30pm for both, did a few and Google finally recrawled the site but they now show as starting at 7:30AM even though on our site it says PM. I looked at some of the sites in your showcase and NC Music Factory has the same issue (remember, search for the venue and upcoming events, not just the venue). The Hotel Congress does not seem to have the issue. Anyone know a solution?

Dave

• This topic was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by birchmere.
• This topic was modified 10 years, 5 months ago by Cliff.

[Cliff]

Hi Birchmere.

Thanks for mentioning some examples like http://ncmusicfactory.com/events and http://hotelcongress.com/events/

I looked through both of those calendars and couldn’t find any all day events.

Regardless, I tested on my local site and an all day event worked just fine. Of course, Google isn’t crawling my local site, but they get the data from the application/ld+json part of the code on the event single page. So you can view the page source of a single event and find that part of the document.

I created an event in Central Standard Time so my test/demo event showed 6am to 5:59:59 am the following day. But this is actually correct in regards to UTC since CST is -6.

I don’t know how an all day event would look like it’d start at a time like 7:30 AM (on a half-hour).

What timezone is set at /wp-admin/options-general.php ?

And what timezone is set at wp-admin > Events > Settings — “Timezone Settings” and is “Show timezone” checked?

Lastly, it’d be helpful to have a link if one of these “wrong time” events is accessible online.

Thanks.

[birchmere]

I think we have a little confusion here 🙂

We are a Concert Hall, we have 100+ events set at any one time. Most of them start at 7:30pm, one or 2 start at 7:00pm and one at 8:00pm. No concert ends at a set time, so when we entered each event we set it as an all day event so no time showed on the website and put in the description that it started at 7:30pm.

We recently discovered that if you Google “Birchmere Upcoming Events” that it shows at the top of the page a bunch of our events but apparently because we had them set as all day events they all showed start time on Google of 12:00am. I figured that it must be getting that info from the plugin so I started setting the start time at 7:30PM on the 1st bunch of events on the site to see if that fixed it. After Google recrawled our site it sort of did, instead of showing a start time of 12:00am it showed 7:30…AM.

Our website where the events are is at http://www.birchmere.com/calendar, you can see a bunch of the 1st events are set at a start time of 7:30pm and an end time of the same (we don’t want someone complaining that we say a show ends at 10pm and it ends at 11pm or anything like that). If you scroll down a bit you’ll see the ones I didn’t change yet have no start or end time.

If you Google “Birchmere Upcoming Events” you’ll see the wrong time, 7:30 am instead of PM.

Time zone is set for New York (we’re on the East Coast).

Hope this helps 🙂

Dave

[Cliff]

Thanks for the link and the additional details to clear things up.

I can see there’s quite a bit of customization on your site so that’s sort of the first indicator something custom may be affecting things.

However, the biggest concern I have is noticing that a single event, such as http://www.birchmere.com/events/delbert-mcclinton-with-damon-fowler/, does NOT have the ‘ld+json’ data in the page source.

I believe the ‘ld+json’ data is how Google should be reading events (reference: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/events) so I’m curious — have your customizations disabled printing the ‘ld+json’ data to the page?

Moving on, I see there is rich snippet information like this in your page source:

A couple of notes about this screenshot in regards to ISO 8601 date and time formats:

1. The hyphen between the date and time should be the capital letter “T”, not a hyphen. It’s apparent that Google is smart enough to read it despite this imperfection.
2. If Google reads the ‘startDate’ meta as 07:30:00, they’d be correct to read it as 7:30 am. 19:30:00 would be 7:30 pm since ISO 8601 requires the 24-hour time format.
3. It’s optional to add a timezone offset (e.g. “−05:00” for Eastern Standard Time) to the end of 19:30:00, but I believe, if omitted, Google assumes it’s the local timezone of wherever the event location is.

All those put together means the content=”…” from that screenshot should instead be 2015-11-05T19:30:00

Because there seems to be quite a lot of customizations on this site, I thought it best to provide you the general information you may need to resolve the “Google AM/PM” issue you initially brought up as the topic of this thread.

Please let me know if you think there’s anything else I can help with.

[birchmere]

I’ll see what I can figure out, I assume by “customization” you mean our Premium Theme? I don’t believe anything has been done to the plugin other than the fact it’s version 2 (the booker that fills in the shows prefers 2 to 3).

I noticed that it should probably have been 19:30 but I’m just setting the time in the plugin to 7:30pm and not sure where I could set the time other than there.

Dave

[Cliff]

I see your site is using v2.4.3 of http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/harmony/, which is the current version of that theme (so not sure about your version 2 vs version 3 statement).

Anyway, I don’t know what customizations you may have, but the page’s source isn’t outputting things the same way my local testing site does so that’s why I think there must be custom code, but maybe there’s a plugin or theme conflict instead.

Another thing you could try is enabling WP_DEBUG and resolving any PHP errors you see while navigating your site’s home page, events page, single-event pages, and any other of your site’s pages relevant to this ticket.

To really determine if there’s an issue with our plugin, we’d need the site to have all non-Modern Tribe plugins deactivated and the theme would need to be one of the WordPress defaults, like Twenty Fifteen.

I know most people don’t want to do this on their live site. Maybe there’s a development/testing copy of your site you could play with.

Please let me know how you think I can best help / what else I can do for you at this time.

 

[birchmere]

Sorry, I meant The Events Calendar Version 2 rather than 3.

I’ll continue to investigate, from Elegant Theme’s forums their newer themes have an issue with Structured Data or don’t support it so that may be it. I might try a plugin that will insert Structured Data, not sure yet. We might be switching themes soon so it may be irrelevant but I’ll continue until then working on it 🙂

[Cliff]

Ah, yes. Well this makes more sense why the page source is so different from my testing.

Maybe the errors/suggestions I provided before was actually from our old code base (before my time) and not from conflicts or customizations.

You’ll need to update to the latest version and stay current on the latest release for us to be able to provide support for the issue.

In summary, I’m guessing the theme isn’t the problem, but I can’t say for sure. You REALLY need to use the latest version of all Modern Tribe plugins for functionality, security, and support reasons.

If it’s simply a style decision why you’re still on version 2, the current version allows minimalistic styling that you can then customize as desired — Tribe, Full, or Skeleton (i.e. get the same/similar look as version 2 while actually using version 3 code base).

I wish you the best with the plugin update(s). You can get the latest versions from your downloads page.

[birchmere]

Thanks, that’s along the lines of what I figured. I appreciate your help in trying to resolve this and understand not being able to really because we’re using an old version. I’ll speak to The Powers That Be and let them know our options and we can mark this closed 🙂

Dave

[Cliff]

Thanks for your understanding. I’m a big advocate for using the latest version (not just of Modern Tribe plugins). If you guys need some help with a few CSS tweaks, we might be able to help. Just open a new thread if needed in the future.

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