If you are using amr-events or amr-ical-events-list plugins with a url for your events, then the markup is already all there for the rich snippets. You may already have improved structured search results.
When event information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make that information available in search results pages. Information such as an event’s title, date, and venue can help users decide which pages to click on in search results.
There is a rich snippet testing tool to check whether your event markup is good enough. Enter the url of a page with your event calendar or widget.
Rich snippets testing
Here are some testing tool examples from websites using these event plugins
Event url
Note: if there is more than one event on the page, then google requires that the event url be included in the markup. Google requires that the event url be on the same domain as the web page. Although many ics editors do not allow you to enter a url, my amr-events plugin will sort that out for your site.
- If you are using amr-events, then you have no problem, the event post is the url.
- If you are only using amr-ical-events-list, never fear, by using a “calendar” url in the widget so that the event summary become hyperlinks, the ‘class=”url”‘ markup will be added and google will be happy.
Date Formats
Google also requires that the date fromat be in a ISO 8601 format so that it is understood. This means that some calendars are not ok with google – Google does not understand german weekdays! I will bear this in mind – there may be a way to meet both requirements.
Thanks Anmari!
Didn’t even notice this! How can I change the excerpt so it displays correctly?
Hi Scott,
I assume you mean where the “Testing Tool” says “Excerpt from the page will show up here. ” I think that means that depending on what the search query is and which page they decide to return and the header/html on that page, will determine the excerpt … ie normal search engine behaviour, plus if they determine that the query is for an event AND you have event, they MAY extract that event markup and display that information.
I don’t know how quickly it is rolling out to all sites (initially was only review site etc)
See Google’s FAQ and maybe add site to the request form.
Another hiccup may be that while the google testing tool can find my plugins markup on your pages, so it confirms tha the markup is correct etc, http://countrymusicchicago.com/ also has a lot of other pages/posts with those same band keywords and those pages / posts do not have the necessary microformat markup. So search results may return that info – does that make sense?
My new plugin amr-events should address that if used for event posts as the “event information” box uses the same logic and thus will also issue the Class=xxxx…. markup (although the theme would need to ensure that the summary or post title has the “summary” class. Hmmm let me think if I can fix that via the plugin? May also need to do something the category.)
Basically One would need to ensure that all the necessary event data is included on the page/post with the right class, not just in the event info box. See this page http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=164506
And just o make it harder – no hidden divs!
Hope that helps
Ah, yeah. That makes sense. Thanks for the detailed reply.
~Scott