Post Type for EME

From the doc: “events are not posts”. EME doesn’t use the custom post type (maybe somewhat legacy, but starting to convert would be a huge job).
However you do have custom action hooks you can use, I efer to the documentation for that.

Thanks Franky… that helps answer my question.

Franky, we chose EME for two community resource websites and love all of EME’s great features. But we’ve struggled for almost three years with very low Google search results for our events. We’ve tried various work-arounds, including event titles and creating special pages to list events, but two SEO consultants have pointed out that Google is not recognizing our individual events and is rarely referring visitors to event listings. The conversation above about post types confirms that event listings aren’t any recognized post-type. We’re reluctantly considering rebuilding the sites with different event software that make event listings pages or posts. Do you have any advice for us? https://happeningsonomacounty.com/ https://learnsonomacounty.com/ Thanks so much!

@dwiig, I think Google and other search engines could care less whether an event is stored in one table in the database or another, is of one post type or another. What might make a difference is the tool you might use to create sitemaps of your site. Is that tool taking into account your events? Are you using the best tool for creating sitemaps, given the rest of your site?

If you could share some more concrete and factual data about this issue, it would do a great service to other users of EME.

@dwiig I had a similar issue.

I found a relatively simple workaround — not the most graceful but it works.

Create a semi-hidden (no interior links but visible) page with all events posted regardless of category. Have the page set to show all possible results. Do not limit the number.

Search Google for “Online Sitemap Generator”; enter the publicly visible url to the events page and let it create the .xml file for you.

You can submit more than one sitemap to Google. Paste this new sitemap in the root directory of your WP install and submit to Google.

https://yoursite.com/your-events-sitemap.xml

Like I said, not so graceful, but it works. Manual updating necessary.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Ben Kaminski.
• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Ben Kaminski.

Ben, by the way, my web development skills are very basic – I rely on others. Can you tell me if these pages are what you describe? https://happeningsonomacounty.com/calendar/ and https://learnsonomacounty.com/find-classes/
On one we limited the number; on the other, we didn’t. One audit of our websites said Google would penalize for having so many links on a page.
I’m going to follow up on the suggestions on site-maps – Thanks so much to both of you!

Google indexes what it can find. If you link your events on a specific page and google knows about that event (due to it being linked from somewhere, or you ask it), those events will get indexed. Google indeed couldn’t care less if it is a wp post type or not.
Many SEO consultants just ask money “to get your site indexed”, but SEO is seldom an aid to get your events (or anything else) indexed, it just adds more info about it into your indexed event (sometimes). I would never pay anyone for SEO-related stuff …

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Franky.

Thanks, Franky. I appreciate your input.

@dwiig looks like either of those URL’s would suffice. Depending on your needs. Just to show that it does work, I’ve included a link to an image of my Search Console where you can see the two sitemaps working in tandem.

https://benkaminski.com/files/shot1.png

I very much agree with Franky though, I would never pay anyone for SEO related stuff. It’s very easy to learn on your own, and it looks like the people hired couldn’t even figure out a work-around?

Btw, I added an extra FAQ entry for google and json (see https://www.e-dynamics.be/wordpress/faq/ ).
Maybe google likes meta-headers too (but I wouldn’t count too much on it).