[Micha McLain]

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[Micha McLain]

I just replied with all of that system info. Please review and let me know. This is a very large site and turning off plugins and themes is not an easy thing to do here. I want to identify the issue specifically and not just “turn everything off”. Please advise.

Micha

[Micha McLain]

This reply is private.

[Micha McLain]

This reply is private.

[Micha McLain]

This reply is private.

[Micha McLain]

Hey… nothing really more to add here at this point. I still think these issues needs to be addressed.

I definitely appreciate your team taking this seriously and will await further feedback from you as to the what and when.

Thanks,
Micha

[Micha McLain]

I too think the right solution is to integrate with SEO plugins. You’re right that if you made some better SEO internally, then users would still have a situation where they’d have good SEO on the calendar, but not anywhere else.

That reason alone is enough to make the choice to provide better support for an SEO plugin.

I really do appreciate you taking this seriously and making it a priority. As I said before, I love the system overall and want to continue to use it.

On the subject of SEO though ( and I have brought this up before as well as other users ), you should really find a way to limit the amount of future dates a calendar makes to limit excessive 404s.

For instance, in my calendar, we only have things schedule a max of 6 months in advance, yet because of the way the plugin works there are literally thousands of future date slugs created. And, because those dates don’t have any calendar info, they return 404s.

I realize there’s debate on whether or not 404s cause issues with SEO, but I believe that that many will. think about it… Google sees a hundred or so “good” pages, and 10k 404 errors. There’s no way that’s helping my site.

So, while this is a different issue than the plugin, it should also be addressed because of the potential negative SEO effects.

As too changing to a different plugin, I much appreciate the openness here, but I’d rather avoid a huge platform shift if I can.

Please keep us posted.

[Micha McLain]

I agree 100% with Riza. Nothing else matters if the site has such poor SEO implementation that it can not rank. the formula is easy… no traffic = no conversions = really bad ROI for your product.

I am feed up with your companies consistent passive nature with this issue. It’s NOT optional.

Now, what can be optional, is what SEO plugin to allow to work with your system. That, I get. Yoast is in the top few for sure, so I would recommend that. But, you could either implement your own SEO settings (as I previously suggested) or you could make your system work with a third party SEO plugin. Either way, SEO IS A MUST, not an after thoughts.

I also never saw sales copy that specifically said your system worked with any other SEO plugin, but there wasn’t anything that said it wouldn’t either. And, given that we’ve never encountered any custom post type system that works as poorly with Yoast, an assumption was made that it would work.

I like the functionality of your system and too would hate to leave. However, between your systems automatic creation of thousands of 404 errors based on future date searches that aren’t relevant and no built in way to stop your system from doing that, to the abysmal SEO capabilities, I’m severely disappointed.

My purchase was much longer than 30 days ago as well. I’ve been hanging in there with you guys based on the notion that you would eventually start fixing these issues. However, I like Riza, feel that you need to stop fixing stupid bugs, and fix these issues that are core to ANY WEBSITE, not just a calendar based system.

For basic, and I do mean very basic SEO, we should have full control over the following:

– Titles
– Meta Descriptions
– Index/No-Index
– Follow/No-Follow

I realize that most of your /event/ and other slugs that are not directly tied to a page are the main issues here. This is simply because you haven’t given us control over these parameters in your system and because they’re slugs and not pages, Yoast simply doesn’t work for it.

At the end of the day, we just need this fixed. Please advise.

Micha

[Micha McLain]

I agree with Riza… As a paying customer for a product that does charge a decent premium, I would expect certain basics like this to be easily covered and not required many lines of custom code.

One idea, would be in your core, to build in a select box for users to select which one of a couple popular SEO plugins. Once selected, the proper code to enable the use of that plugin would be enabled.

Not only can I not set the title and meta for /events/ root page, but further more, the design of you plugin causes massive amounts of 404 errors in Google Webmasters, which I’ve brought up in deferent threads, but the issue has never fully been rectified.

At the end of the day, you have zero build in SEO functions, and don’t allow any outside SEO tools to help users without lots of code. This should not be the case.

I want a simply solution… which is why we all purchased a prebuilt one. Otherwise, we’d either code our own or hire a develop to.

Please advise.

[Micha McLain]

I’m sorry, but why your system is convoluted in this regard is beyond me. Why can’t you do one of the two:

1) Make editable fields for users that buy your system to simply enter title and meta

2) Make your system work with a SEO Plug like Yoast or another

The reason most people buy plugins like this is to avoid having to define custom functions in PHP in the first place. Not only this, but titles are a very basic function… very.

Please explain why your company chooses to make this much more difficult than it needs to be.

Micha

[Micha McLain]

Yeah, I’m not sure about which way the 404s are better. It was just an idea. If the 404s don’t cause a problem, then maybe I don’t need to be concerned about it. I’ve just read in many places that too many 404s can hurt web rankings.

I’m glad you added that with the dates for the events. That should help out a lot. I realize that people can obviously still search for whatever, but it should make at least some difference. I just thought that when searching for a date that shows empty results, you could redirect to an editable page to give the customers whatever kind of message you want would be much nicer that a 404.

Just a thought.

Thanks,
Micha

[Micha McLain]

Thanks for the response. I could be way off here as I’m not that much of a developer, but I would think that the best solution is to have the dates still searchable as they are, but to just not have it return a 404. Why can’t this date search show a webpage that doesn’t have an event, but that does NOT mean a 404 error. That doesn’t seem to complicated.

Also, I think there should be some controls to set some loose parameters on the overall dates. For instance, I noticed dates 50-60 years in the future being 404 as well as some 20 years in the past. I would make a setting that has a “start date” that allows us to select the absolute date of when the site calendar should go back to. Then, there should be a relative date for the future meaning a setting that says my calendar goes out 1 year or 5 years or whatever, but that date is always relative to the current date. This alone would reduce my 404s drastically. Then, if you coded these pages to show empty results but NOT actually be 404s (because they’re not), then I think all these problems would simply go away, regardless of what SEO plugin we used.

That said, I titled this with Yoast in the the title because as per the last thread, I was told that “it was Yoast’s fault” this happens. I was just trying to make the title as relevant as possible, even though I’m not sold that it is there fault. I have no way of knowing first hand though because I’m not a developer.

Thanks again for your time.

Micha

[Micha McLain]

By the way, you guys should put a URL on your sidebar to make it easy for users to get back to their forums. The URL is https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/users/username/

I’m surprised that it’s not there. I had to click a user, see the URL structure, then replace my user to even find this past topic. Not very efficient.

Thanks.
Micha

[Micha McLain]

Hey. That did the trick. Thanks very much.

Is this something you will write into the next update? I’m just wondering if I need to leave this code in my functions file permanently or not.

Thanks again.

[Micha McLain]

Oh yeah… thanks.

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