Google and Past Events Listing

Feature Requests
1

Hello,

We have come across a situation where events from previous years are still found in Google Search. We did a search for College Care Week and the first two results that it pulled are from 2021 and 2022.

https://www.google.com/search?q=College+Care+Week

What is the best way to prevent this? Does LiveWhale Events Calendar have a way so that may be events beyond 6 months to a year are not returned in Google Search results?

Thanks,

AKbar

2

I just asked the same question yesterday.

3

Glad we are not the only ones noticing this. :grinning:

1 Like
4

Thanks you two! Weā€™re checking this out and will let you know what we find.

1 Like
5

Hi folks,

Hereā€™s what weā€™ve found with regards to this:

  • LiveWhaleā€™s auto-generated sitemaps only include upcoming events (while past events still remain crawlable)
  • We do not instruct search engines to remove past events, we only tell the search engines that the listing is of the type ā€œeventā€ and let them each decide on their own behavior about how to prune according to date.

So, in that sense, weā€™re not ā€œpromotingā€ past events to Google via the sitemap, but weā€™re also not telling them ā€œdonā€™t index this.ā€ Do you think we should? I could imagine some cases where, for instance, a ā€˜noindexā€™ meta tag on a past event might not be what you want. I welcome any thoughts you all would like to share about how you might envision this working ideally for your use cases. Thanks!

Karl

6

Are there any best practices when it comes to removing old events from search engines?

For example, if you Google ā€œAngelo State University bonfireā€, the first few results are from years ago. The event that happened this year is the fifth result for me.

Is there anything we should be doing (or doing differently) to help upcoming events show up higher in search engines or remove past events entirely?

7

Just as LiveWhale displays events six months into the future starting with the current date. I believe setting a timeline on past events might be helpful. LW has many events calendar users and they should also offer their thoughts on this. I think setting a timeline of 1-2 years might be a reasonable way to go.

8

I tend to think that past events should get a noindex meta tag, but not sure if that should get added immediately after the event, or after some time has passed. Perhaps a global config so clients could choose for themselves?

I agree with @aehsan too that there are a lot of calendar clients, and Iā€™d want to get some more opinions on the topic.

1 Like
9

+1 to global config option if people would really want to show old events, but I think the default should be that it doesnā€™t. A calendar is an active tool and old results make it look outdated; it sounds like the old events were distracting for yall. This behavior also does not match the default internal search on the livewhale calendar, which only provides upcoming events.

I personally wouldnā€™t want old calendar events to show up in search ever. We have news archives and photo albums and such to remember when/what events happened, and I wouldnā€™t want people to get in the habit that the calendar is an archive instead of an active tool for current use. Just my 2 cents (:

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10

I discussed this with our Marketing team. They think there is some value in retaining events in search engines for some period after the event passes, but not indefinitely. Maybe 1 year would be sufficient. I feel like a client-configurable option would be a win.

I am contemplating attempting to customize our site. Iā€™m thinking it could be as simple as adding some (X)PHP to the event template to add a noindex tag if the event date is older than X.

I am not sure if the equivalent would be as simple for calendar pages since those are JS-based.

Thoughts?

1 Like
11

Thanks folks! Iā€™ve added this suggestion to our roadmapā€”I like the idea of a configurable amount of time after which each event would get a noindex metatag, so you could set it to 0 (so they immediately get noindex after event has passed) or some other period of time.

Jon, if you were looking to do this in a custom approach in the meantime, it doesnā€™t appear that the core event-specific function (addCalendarMetaData) is currently met by any module handlers, but perhaps with an onLoad or onOutput you could parse the server request_uri to get an event details format and add/override the noindex metatag that way.

1 Like