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Hi. I’ve checked the forum but did not really see anything on this. Just installed the Pro plugin…you guys have done a great job with this in many respects.
Currently recurring events generate one event post for each occurence of the event. I believe this is a drawback for two reasons.
1. It leads to a lot of what search engines will see as ‘duplicate content’ and lowers the SEO ‘score’ of sites. (Same event info on 52 pages with only the date being different is bad).
2. It makes comments and reviews irrelevant to a large extent because they are spread out over many pages.If we have a recurring event and all occurences where attached to the same post / same URL then any reviews for the event posted in the comments would be seen in subsequent weeks.
It seems like this would not be a minor change, however, it’s critical for our site. Is there a way to achieve it? I am not a developer, but I do have one. Just looking for a little guidance.
Hi Larry,
You bring up some good points but unfortunately we will not be making any changes to the way recurring events are handled at the time being. We have a new version (3.0) coming out soon which is a major overhaul and has taken the majority of our effort. After this comes out we may revisit looking into improving the way recurring events are handled. But no guarantees.
Sorry I can’t offer up more here.
– Jonah
Hi Larry,
Not at the moment although I can attest to there being some really cool features in the new version. We’ll post a public announcement when the official word is ready.
– Jonah
I am having the same concern with duplicate content on recurring events too. We use the events calendar pro for our monthly recreation calendar, which is comprised of 95% recurring events. We have a boatload of duplicate pages now. How can we prevent search engines from indexing this content? (This content’s sole purpose is for our users, not for SEO)
Here is a link to February’s calendar: http://elderhealthandliving.com/events/2013-02/. Most every event is either recurring or the same title but on a different day. I’m considering just blocking all our plugins in the robots.txt file for now.
We have a beta version of a plugin that links all instances of a recurring event to ONE post and eliminates this SEO and usability issue. Still working out the mass handling of changing all events in a series from draft to published and then are going to update it to work with version 3.0 of the EC plugin.
In the meantime, you can try setting a canonical URL for search engines to defer to, but not sure what it would take in terms of upkeep in the case of your particular work flow. Still, better than blocking the whole thing.
Thanks for your reply, Larry. If I’m not using the calendar for SEO purposes, I don’t see why blocking the plugin is a big deal. Yoast even suggests blocking plugins in his post about robots.txt, here: http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/
Great!
You said “How can we prevent search engines from indexing this content?”, so I assumed your current solution of blocking all of the content was not adequate. Sounds like it is so that is awesome!
Hi all,
I was going to suggest trying the 3.0 beta as well. Larry, so can you confirm that recurring events are all linked to one post and thus preventing duplicate post/content viewable by search engines?
@ElderHealth, we’d be happy to let you try the 3.0 beta if you’d like to confirm this yourself. Let me know.
Thanks,
JonahJonah, Yoast sitemap only shows one instance for each event, even if it is recurring; There is only one event post for each one and the calendar and other event loops link only to one page with one unique URL (with no date). So it seems pretty solid to me. We can confirm once we launch it on production and check Google Webmaster Tools to see what they see.
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