Json-LD schema info not being pulled into google

[Brandi]

I did a search for “{town name} events” and saw the events section at the top that pulls in info using schema to display events for the local area. I noticed our site isn’t listed in there despite using the events calendar pro plugin that uses Json-LD schema.

I ran the schema i could find for a specific event through a json schema checker and it came back with an error because the whole schema was wrapped in brackets [ ]. Is this why my events aren’t being pulled into google? Or did the json validator misinterpret the json?

[George]

Hey Brandi,

Excuse my ignorance/mis-understanding here, but would you mind clarifying each of the following things just so I’m 100% on the same page as you are here?

1. I did a search for “{town name} events” – Where did you do this search?

2.the events section at the top that pulls in info using schema to display events for the local area – Can you specify what section this is? Take a screenshot of it if possible, even, just so we know exactly what you’re talking about.

3. I ran the schema i could find for a specific event through a json schema checker and it came back with an error because the whole schema was wrapped in brackets [ ] – This almost certainly means the json stored in the “tribe-json” attribute for events when they’re listed in the Month view. If that’s the case, the json is not invalid. It is written/structured in that case in an HTML attribute and being used to generate the events after page load in the Month view.

Hopefully we can start by clarifying all the terms here, then offer some more specific help/advice 🙂

Thank you!
George

[Brandi]

Thanks for replying George. Sorry my earlier post was vague.

1. By search I mean using Google to search. I notice if i type a cities name and then the word event, that our website is not being pulled in to the special section that appear. Google uses its Knowledge Graph. I was looking through the source code and noticed that our side uses json-ld, one of the methods google talks about using, but don’t understand why our site information isn’t being shown.

2. I looked through the source code for a single event (not a month or list view) and found the script tag in the head that includes json-ld.
<script type="application/ld+json">[{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"Event","name":"Business After Hours – Bartlesville Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram – July 9, 2015","image":"http://www.bartlesville.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/BAHws.jpg","url":"http://www.bartlesville.com/calendar/business-after-hours-bartlesville-chrysler-dodge-jeep-ram/","startDate":"2015-07-09T23:00:00+00:00","endDate":"2015-07-10T00:30:00+00:00","location":{"@type":"Place","name":"Bartlesville Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram","address":"3250 SE Washington Blvd\t"}}]</script>

I guess the end goal here is to figure out our events aren’t being pulled into Google. Thoughts?

[George]

Hey Brandi,

No problem! Thanks for clarifying everything, I assumed you meant a Google search and everything you listed there, but just wanted to be 100% sure.

This is unfortunately a bit of an odd issue. The square brackets around the data shouldn’t cause problems – as an example, if you test out an event from our demo site at http://wpshindig.com/events with Google’s official validator tool for this, it works fine. That validator tool itself can be found here → https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

If you try a URL for a single event from your site on that tool, does it work correctly?

For an example of “working correctly”, when I plugged this event URL into the tool’s “Fetch URL” field:
http://wpshindig.com/event/wordpress-maui-meetup/2015-07-16/

It was a success and showed the following result: https://cloudup.com/cLxK4Y8tLYs

There’s one warning about the missing “offers” value, but that’s just because it’s a recommended thing to add – it certainly wouldn’t prevent the rest of the data from working.

Try out your site and let us know what you find. If it works similarly well, then unfortunately the reason for the events not showing up in search results could be for any number of reasons on Google’s end of things. If your site is relatively new, as well, that might hinder its showing up in prominent search results for a bit.

I hope this information helps!

Thanks,
George

[Brandi]

Thanks for getting back to me. The Site i’m doing it on has been live for a year getting around 3k visits a month during that whole time, so it should be indexed.

I was looking through the event property, and I noticed the entire event address (street, city, state zip) gets put inside the Name property of the Place or Postal array (Heres a screenshot of my sites schema). When I look up other events that are pulled into google, they list the those attributes in the address properties (Screenshot of other site’s schema).

I think because the address is put into the “name” property instead of the address property, that google might not be showing the events.

[George]

That’s a great find, thank you for the update Brandi. Are you aware of anything about your use of The Events Calendar that might lead to this? For example, are you filling out Venue address information in any weird/non-normative way, or using a bunch of custom fields or something? Anything at all that is non-normative and might lead to this?

If not, then I guess it’s possible that a theme or plugin conflict on your site could lead to a mix-up like this…although I don’t notice any such thing on your site when I investigate it.

Thanks for looking into this, and for your patience with this issue. I would like to clarify that we are not ruling out some sort of bug/problem with The Events Calendar itself here – however, at this time it does not seem like the core plugin code itself is to blame here (I investigated this myself, and then some other developers on our team have investigated this without issue as well).

Let us know about how you’re entering Address data for events on your site, or anything else you think might be relevant.

Thank you!
George

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

Posts