Dilemma

• We want the  search engines to find and index our content – eg events and calendar pages.  We want those upcoming events to be very visible in search results
• We don’t the search spiders to use too much bandwidth while they crawl.

Summary

The events plugin does what it can to help get your events indexed (see below).  Dynamic event lists change frequently (daily or more?) as time goes by – they drop off old events and show the newer ones.  These frequent “updates” could perhaps cause more attention from a search engine.    Widgets (box and calendar) that have internal links back to the main calendar page can also make google think that page is important.  Especially if those widgets are on every page.

Maybe that is what you want, and maybe it is not!  You may need to control it.

You the webmaster can help the seach engine spiders or crawlers further to index your site while not chomping all your bandwith.

How events plugin helps indexing:

• the html markup includes rich snippets, microformats, hcalendar support
• the plugin uses wordpress as much as it can, so you can integrate other plugins to maximise Seo.  Seo plugins can be used on event posts, as can Social plugins.
• Nice event permalinks can be generated for event (NB: be aware of conflicts)

Other tools to manage indexing and bandwidth

• Google webmaster tools are excellent
• WordPress has some plugins that may help.  Eg:See reduce-your-wordpress-bandwidth-and-increase-pagerank.   Yoast’s one is well regarded and ticks many of the boxes http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

How to get your events indexed:

• Read the well regarded yoast’s definitive guide to wordpress seo or the short checklist here
• How to make your event rank higher (advises wordpress (yeah!), keywords, clear structure etc)

How to manage bandwidth

• Google doesn’t want to overwhelm your site
• Change the crawl rate (maybe – some folks say not, and caution  required in controlling the crawling. See webpronews article)
• Tell google which url parameters to ignore (be careful) Resources:
• Google webmaster blog: improved handling of urls with parameters
• See also: Google webmaster blog: do 404s hurt my site
• Use canonicals if providing multiple views of same data (eg; agenda and calendar)
• sitemaps (xml or html),
• robots.txt,
• nofollow on internal links that we do NOT want indexed,
• avoid links in js, ajax etc
• finding-and-fixing-search-engine-crawing-issues

Notes

• Think carefully about using multple views and about the sidebar widgets that can generate a plethora of links back to the calendar page -Get other measures  in place to avoid overemphasising the calendar page importance
• Attempting to avoid bandwith issues may affect indexing – wrt query string parameters.  Best is to ‘tell’ google what to focus on.  See webmaster guidelines
• It seems google will be indexing the POST variables too and they advise sticking with GET (ie the query parameters)
• Hmm – maybe adding rel=”next” and “prev” to pagination will help avoid diluting page rank? See googles video or article
• Also we should consider sidebar widget issues – links on every page that point to the same  may overly highlight the calendar page and make it more important – sometimes this is intentional and sometimes not.  Related question via Brad Gosse: 2010/12/06/do-tag-clouds-in-sidebars-affect-seo-ranks?    Should the widgets have no follow links on certain links ? …. but we want that indexing….maybe just the rel control?