Draft:Event

Date created: December 5, 2019

Last update: December 8, 2019

Forward:

Google commands 88.5% of the Internet search market.^[1] My research indicates that 5 out of 7 music venue websites are not reaching the featured artist's Google Event Knowledge Graph Card.^[2] If your venue is not reaching Google in an informative and timely basis, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. The typical fan is interested in an artist and a location, their Google search will generally be, Artist Name + Tour. For some artists, Google will display a horizontal Event Card for their events when they are reasonably confident that the information is accurate. My testing indicates that Google would prefer that the information originates from venues that have been verified in Google Places. When the artist's website offers a matching event scheduled, re-affirms that Google has the correct information. I believe that Google may be becoming hesitant to accept event data from ticket re-sellers.

Event missing from the artist's above the fold Event Graph, miss out on taking advantage of the artist's name recognition.

The topmost section of the page reads, "Postmodern Jukebox > Events". If your event / venue is not listed in the section at the top of artist's the Event Knowledge Graph card, the reader is errantly informed and moves on.

The rest of this document details the best-practices your webmaster can implement to get your event information to the artist's Event Knowledge Graph. It is extremely important that the event details originate from the venue's website.

Website Setup

Step 1: Google My Business (get verified by Google)

A typical Google My Business card -- Channel Islands Arts Studios in Camarillo, CA

The Google My Business card is the display panel to the right of the search result text.

The first step is to ensure that the venue's Google My Business card exists (aka Google Places) and has been verified. This is generally accomplished with an online application, Google then mails a postcard to the business address provided, the postcard contains a code that the webmaster then submits online at the Google My Business interface within 10 days.

Once confirmed, Google has an added level of confidence that the information coming from the venue's website is true and correct. The confirmation is important because Google is able to disambiguate similar business names from each other in addition to preventing spam and fraud schemes.

The webmaster can add Posts to the Knowledge Graph Card, Post choices are Update, Event, Offer and Product. Adding an event to the venue's card will display in the venue's Event Panel, but it is unlikely that it will also display in the performing artist's Event Panel because this interface is rather unsophisticated.

https://www.google.com/business/

Note: The most important part for our purposes is that the My Business Card displays the website's correct URL and that the Business Card has been claimed and verified. If the Card has already been published but has not been verified, it will contain a link that reads, "Own this business?"

Step 2: sitemap.xml

In the testing I have completed so far, I consistently not find a sitemap.xml for all of the venue websites where the event was absent from my artist's Event Graph Card. Another commonality among these websites is that they were hosted on WordPress and performed poorly on PageSpeed Insights.

Note websites hosted on platforms like WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace etc., are database driven, which requires extra time and effort for search engine spiders to index, the common practice is to also provide "structured data" (schema.org) to inform the search engines what the page is about.^[3]

There appears to be two different scenarios concerning sitemaps...

==== Internally hosted events page ====

Ensure that the venue's website has a sitemap.xml file. The sitemap is a file that tells the search engine spider the locations of pages beneath the homepage, the page's priority and how often the spider check for updates. Most sitemap frequency is set to monthly, where it would be more appropriate for an Events page to be indexed weekly or even daily.^[4]

For a website where the structure does not change frequently a manual sitemap may suffice, there are online services that generate both static or dynamic sitemap.xml files. In either case, the sitemap should be be inspected to ensure that it conforms with www.sitemaps.org. For WordPress, there are plugins that will provide dynamic sitemaps, the frequency for the "Yoast" plugin is fixed at one month, the frequency appears to be adjustable on "Google XML Sitemaps" By Arne Brachhold. I have favorable experience with Yoast, but have not experimented with Arne Brachhold's plugin.

Externally hosted events page

If your events page is hosted on an external page, such as, //myDomainName.ticketfly.com/, it appears that the page should not be included in the sitemap,^[5] What appears to be working (as of Dec, 2019) is if your page is //myDomainName.com/events and your are redirecting to //myDomainName.ticketfly.com/, then the page //myDomainName.com/events should have the statement canonical //myDomainName.ticketfly.com/ before the redirect occurs.

Example

<head>

<title>Example.com | Events </title>

...

redirect code

</head>

Google on canonical referencing^[6]

Step 3: Google Search Console

Do enter your website or domain in Google Search Console. In addition to providing a place to declare your sitemap.xml, you can live test your pages and submit new and changed pages for indexing. Search console will also periodically test your pages for mobile compatibility and report search statistics.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results. You don't have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.^[7]

https://search.google.com/search-console/about

Webpage setup

Often listed at the top of an artist's search result, the Google Event panel is the premier Internet location for free Internet advertising. Because Google provides these Event listing at the top of their results page, it is highly unlikely that a potential customer will look elsewhere on the page to search for additional events. Most will assume that if Google does not have the listing, it does not exist.

In relation to the potential for lost revenue, it is very inexpensive to correctly configure your website to reach the various artist's Google Event Panel.

Eventbrite boosts traffic 100%

In the month following implementation of the new search experience, we saw roughly a 100-percent increase in the typical year-over-year growth of traffic from Google Search to our event listing pages, according to Google Analytics." The enriched search experience "definitely has been helpful for driving traffic and getting additional ticket sales.

—Allen Jilo, Product Manager at Eventbrite^[8]

Step 4: Structured data for Events

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/event

Introduction to Structured Data by Manu Sporny

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x_xzT5eF5Q

The ticket sales (and re-sales) industry uses structured data

List of ticket vendors

BandsInTown:

warning performer (The description field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

Eventbrite:

warning price (The price field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

warning performer (The description field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

Ticketfly: (ticketsmarter?)

No leaf page

warning price (The price field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

warning description (The description field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

songkick.com:

warning endDate (The endDate field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

warning image (The image field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

warning offers (The offers field is recommended. Please provide a value if available.)

References

↑ "Topic: Search engine usage". www.statista.com. 2019-03-26. Archived from the original on 2019-03-26. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
↑ "Upcoming Events In The Knowledge Graph". Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]. 2017-07-29. Archived from the original on 2017-07-29. Retrieved 2019-12-06. The information on this blog is dated, included for historical referenceCS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
↑ "Understand how structured data works - Search". Google Developers (in Latina). Retrieved 2019-12-06. Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
↑ "Learn about sitemaps". Search Console Help. Retrieved 2019-12-06. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.
↑ "Google: Avoid Including Redirected URLs in Sitemaps". The SEM Post. 2018-08-27. Archived from the original on 2019-05-14. Retrieved 2019-12-06. Google is reminding site owners that they shouldn’t add URLs that are being redirected in the sitemap they submit to Google. The question came up on Twitter about whether it should be avoided or if there was no detrimental effect to having them in a sitemap.
↑ "Consolidate duplicate URLs". Search Console Help. 2019-12-04. Archived from the original on 2019-12-04. Retrieved 2019-12-06. If you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. If you don't explicitly tell Google which URL is canonical, Google will make the choice for you, or might consider them both of equal weight, which might lead to unwanted behavior, as explained below in Why should I choose a canonical URL?
↑ "Search Console Help". About Search Console. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
↑ (Eventbrite case study)

[www.statista.com_2019-1] "Topic: Search engine usage". www.statista.com. 2019-03-26. Archived from the original on 2019-03-26. Retrieved 2019-12-06.

[Official_Google_Webmaster_Central_Blog_2015-2] "Upcoming Events In The Knowledge Graph". Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]. 2017-07-29. Archived from the original on 2017-07-29. Retrieved 2019-12-06. The information on this blog is dated, included for historical referenceCS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

[Google_Developers_Structured_Data-3] "Understand how structured data works - Search". Google Developers (in Latina). Retrieved 2019-12-06. Google Search works hard to understand the content of a page. You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.

[Search_Console_Help_Sitemap-4] "Learn about sitemaps". Search Console Help. Retrieved 2019-12-06. A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files: for example, for pages, when the page was last updated, how often the page is changed, and any alternate language versions of a page.

[The_sitemap_redirect_2018-5] "Google: Avoid Including Redirected URLs in Sitemaps". The SEM Post. 2018-08-27. Archived from the original on 2019-05-14. Retrieved 2019-12-06. Google is reminding site owners that they shouldn’t add URLs that are being redirected in the sitemap they submit to Google. The question came up on Twitter about whether it should be avoided or if there was no detrimental effect to having them in a sitemap.

[Search_Console_Help_canonical-6] "Consolidate duplicate URLs". Search Console Help. 2019-12-04. Archived from the original on 2019-12-04. Retrieved 2019-12-06. If you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. If you don't explicitly tell Google which URL is canonical, Google will make the choice for you, or might consider them both of equal weight, which might lead to unwanted behavior, as explained below in Why should I choose a canonical URL?

[About_Search_Console-7] "Search Console Help". About Search Console. Retrieved 2019-12-06.

[8] (Eventbrite case study)

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