Recurring events and no index

[karen]

While I am relatively new to this business, I am a learning being. I was checking my Google Webmaster health and noticed that the events that are recurring all have the same names, therefore Google considers them to be duplicates. this is probably not in the slightest way important, but since I am new to this, it occurs to me if GOOGLE considers this duplicate content it would devalue my website. What are your thoughts, observations, knowledge? thanks!

[Rob]

Hey Karen! Thanks for reaching out here, and for your note. We’re learning beings ourselves so this works out nicely 🙂 This is something I’ve asked Joyce, our newly-minted support team member, to address. She’s well versed in SEO and will be hitting the forums this evening…so expect a response sometime thereafter. Thanks for your support and patience so far.

[Joyce Grace]

Hello Karen!
Yes, you’re right, it can be an SEO issue, I’ve thought about that too. What you can do is no-index those pages. You can also tell Google not to index them in your robots.tx file, the same way you would use that robots.txt file to tell Google not to archive your taxonomies or author archives, because those are duplicate content too.
A plugin I like to use for this is WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you want to learn more about the no-indexing and the logic behind the controls in WordPress SEO by Yoast, there are some good videos on wordpress.tv – just search for “Joost de Valk.”
A good example of a robots.txt file can be found on SEO guru John Chow’s site, johnchow.com/robots.txt – if you follow those patterns, you can add more specific file paths to tell Google not to bother looking at. It will also help load your site faster, which is also good for SEO 🙂

Hope this helps!

[karen]

thank you Joyce. And welcome! and yes, I thought about that , but then would Google be able to find the events? Sometimes I get hits just on my events. I will take a look and see if I can no index just the recurring ones.

[Joyce Grace]

Yeah, that will be hard – you’ll have to get one indexed, and then not the rest. Maybe you can make one, and if you figure out how, you can get the rest to have a rel canonical link URL to the one that you want all of them to point to. That’s more complicated though…but do let me know if you figure out a solution! I also thought of this dilemma the first time I created a recurring event. I’m really looking forward to more add-ons like the Eventbrite and Facebook events add-ons. Hopefully eventually we’ll have a Meetup.com add-on too 🙂

[Author]

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