SEO advice using Event Calendar Pro for training events

[Mike]

I placed this question here: wordpress forum. But it got closed with a request to place directly here. Hope this is the right location now.

We have different courses that we offer. For each course we make a WordPress Page to describe what the course is about.
Then we create for each course a Calendar Event. The problem is that some courses we organise for example 1x per month. I don’t know what the best way is to do this from an SEO point of view. What titles to use, what description to use. Because basically we do not have it 1x, but we have it 1x + 12x time as a Calendar Event. Obviously that is not great for SEO if you duplicate content to much.

Maybe somebody solved this problem and can share some best practice.

This is what we do today. For example. We create a course (a WordPress page) with Title “Introduction to ABC”. On this page we describe the course, i.e., Objective, Who should Attend, What do you get, etc.

The we create Calendar Events:
Title: Introduction to ABC – New York – January 2018
Title: Introduction to ABC – Boston – February 2018
Title: Introduction to ABC – San Fransisco – March 2018
Title: Introduction to ABC – Los Angeles – March 2018

For each event we then give a small description, the dates, location, signup link etc. I have the feeling though that this is not the best way to do it. The events do not describe the full course. Linking to the event page, takes away the focus from the calendar event. Each has more or less the same description which leads to a duplicate content issue. Cannot really change much other then date, location. It is the same course.

Ideal would be to have a table on the WordPress Page with the calendar event dates and locations. But then why use the Calendar Event plugin…..

Any advice on what a good SEO approach here?

[Barry]

Hi Mike,

That’s an interesting problem.

I’d be happy to explore it with you a little, but ultimately we are not SEO consultants and so can really only speak to what is possible and how you might achieve it.

To start with, you could add meta tags to all single events telling search engines not to index them. That way the information would still be present on your main calendar and other event views for your visitors to consume — and search engines will extract the data they need from the main event view.

Alternatively, for recurring events specifically, you could override the canonical link and have it point to the ‘all’ page for the event series. What I mean by this is, if you have a recurring events with a URL something like mysite.com/event/recurring-event/2018-07-01 then the canonical URL link (which already exists) could be changed to point to mysite.com/event/recurring-event/all.

You might even combine those strategies and perhaps only add no-index meta tags to single instances of recurring events — and alter the canonical link for each.

How beneficial this would be/exactly what impact this will have on your search ranking, though, is harder to guess at … but I do hope this at least gives you some paths to explore 🙂

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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