According to the help site, we can set the…
Max age (in seconds) of dynamic content before it receives a “noindex” meta tag…
Can I get a clarification of what “max-age” means? For events, does the “age” start at the start of the event or after the event has passed?
For example, if I want to add noindex to events the day after they occur, would I set the noindex_ttl to 0 or 86400 (seconds in 24 hours)?
Sure Jon – the “age” starts at 0 on the editor-selected date (or date/time, for events) of the item.
For instance, News stories just have a date, so if your news story is dated January 15, a noindex_ttl of 86400 would mean it starts getting a noindex tax on January 16.
For events, we can also have a start time as well, so that would mean an event January 15 at 1pm with a noindex_ttl of 86400 would have a noindex tag starting January 16 at 1pm. Or, you can set noindex_ttl to 0 and it will get noindex “the moment it’s passed,” so to speak. Hope this helps!
@karl Thanks for the clarification. I added the following to public.config.php, so events will get noindex after 24 hours.
$_LW->REGISTERED_WIDGETS['events']['custom']['noindex_ttl']=86400;
I’m not sure it is working though. Here is an event that happened on Monday - Yuja: Getting Started · Angelo State University. I don’t see the noindex meta tag in the source code.
Is there a process that runs on a schedule to add the tags? Or am I doing something wrong?
Hi Jon,
I see what you mean—taking a closer look, it appears that the /live/events version isn’t getting that noindex applied.
However, when I checked that event directly from the Calendar, which uses the /calendar/events URL here: Yuja: Getting Started / Events Calendar · Angelo State University, I do see that noindex is getting applied.
I’ll flag this up for the team to take a look at those different scenarios—Thanks for pointing this out!
Rachael
Interesting. I hadn’t even checked the calendar pages yet. I just assumed noindex would get added in both places though.
Let me know what you find out. I can maybe add some xphp in the event details template to add noindex there if necessary, in the meantime.
Hi Jon,
I believe we’ve got this tracked down now, and we’ll be including an update in our next LiveWhale release to cover both the /live/events and /calendar/event scenarios for including the noindex.
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Rachael
How does this work with long duration events, like museum exhibits, that could run for months. For example: April 17 - Sept. 12?
Your description appears to focus on hour-long events, specifically mentioning the “start time” and how an event with a time of 0 will noindex once the event starts.
That makes me concerned that the noindex may be based solely on the start date/time. If that were the case, then a multi-day event would drop from the index well before it completes.
I want to make sure I understand this point before I set up this option.
Good point Nick – right now it’s calculated just based on the start date/time. I’ll put in an adjustment for our roadmap to instead base it on the end date/time (if present) for events specifically. 
Thanks Karl. Glad I asked. I’ll avoid setting an events value for now.