url for ical event entry causing SEO issue

[Stephen]

We’re seeing the urls for events showing up twice, one being the /?ical=1 version for each & every event. Without having rel=canonical, on the ical version, we’re concerned about presenting google with 2 identical base urls giving different content depending on query string parameters.

There also seems to be no option to have noindex & nofollow applied to the ical url version which might be slightly helpful in this situation to lower SEO risk.

Additionally, we’re concerned about the volume of urls getting created as number of events increases, given that each event brings two urls. The concern is that over time, our crawl budget will be stressed more than it needs to be, as events are added.

Our most desired solution for this is to be able to deactivate ical functionality. Can you help us in this regard?

Thanks!

[Cliff]

Hi Stephen. Thanks for your question and the background information.

Would you be able to send me a screenshot or two where Google Webmaster Tools shows that it’s indexing the /?ical=1 URLs, just for our documentation if we do turn this into a bug report or feature request to our developers?

To disable single events’ iCal links, you might try using the tribe_get_single_ical_link filter (e.g. _return_false), or another one found in this file: /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/functions/template-tags/ical.php

Looking forward to hearing back.

[Stephen]

Hi Cliff,

I completely forgot to respond to this. At present we don’t have WMT in use because we are still on a dev site, so I’ll look at this issue again after launch when WMT is attached.

However, the recommended solution raises a question —

If we make the changes you mention below regarding adjustments to the php files, aren’t these changes likely to be overwritten later as updates are released for the events calendar?

Thanks
Steve

[Cliff]

Thanks for the update.

If you’re asking about using the filter I mentioned, you would be placing code in your child theme’s functions.php file. You would not be modifying any of our plugin’s code.

If you’re unfamiliar with how to leverage WordPress hooks (i.e. actions and filters), this is a good reference.

This filter may be exactly what you’re wanting or it may only be one part, depending on how much iCal turning off you really want to do.

You could probably also just not mess with our plugins’ hooks (PHP) and just hide all iCal-related stuff via CSS (e.g. hiding the button on Event Single page view).

You can add custom CSS code via your child theme’s style.css file or via a plugin like Simple Custom CSS or, my favorite, Jetpack. Jetpack supports regular CSS and the LESS and Sass pre-processors.

If you’re not a CSS expert, Jetpack’s Custom Design reference may prove helpful.

Please let me know how it goes for you.

[Stephen]

Great, thanks for the confirmations & clarifications!

[Cliff]

My pleasure. Thanks for letting me know it answered your q’s.

[Author]

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