Recurring events causing content duplication – bad for SEO?

[Isaac]

Hello, I am concerned about the fact that recurring events all share exactly the same titles and content, despite having different URLs. I recently began adding recurring events to my blog, and now, I am seeing in my Google Webmasters Tools account that there is a great deal of content duplication on my site.

How can I fix this? How negative are recurring events from an SEO point of view? Can this be ignored?

As always, any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

[Rob]

Hey Isaac. Thanks for the note here, and for reaching out. Generally the recurrence itself isn’t cause for concern from an SEO standpoint; we haven’t heard anyone raise that concern thus far and haven’t seen it as an issue for any of the client sites we’ve used this plugin on.

That being said, there is an issue where the indexing of many pages can cause concern. We’ve been working towards implementation an official fix but in the interim have provided some code that can work as a solution. The most relevant thread to review for that code would be this one: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/thousands-of-urls-for-every-future-date-possible-auto-generated-possible-bug/. For some background information on the issue, check out this slightly older thread: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/indexation-of-thousands-pages/.

If I understand the issue correctly, that should get you what you need. But let me know if you’re still having problems from there.

[Isaac]

Hi Rob, thanks. I actually haven’t spotted any extra-indexing problems in my Webmaster Tools account so far. I was just concerned about the fact that the same (or very similar) content was appearing on several recurring pages under slightly modified URLs.

But although this may not be a problem, I still found a fix for this. Since I use Yoast WordPress SEO, what I do is that I create an event without setting any recurrence for it and then publish it.

I then edit it and paste its normal URL in the “Canonical URL” box of WP SEO on the Post Edit page, then set the event’s recurrence, and update the event.

This causes all recurring event pages to have the main/true event page as their Canonical URL. So far, this works pretty well.

But thanks for the help!

[Rob]

Isaac: thanks for the follow-up. Awesome to hear you found a solution with Yoast here; this definitely should alleviate indexing concerns and could be of value to other users who share your concern down the road. Thanks for sharing on that end.

It sounds like you’re set here but if any other issues arise, please do let us know.

[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]

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