Improvements and changes to the Events Section
At Virtual Swanage we are always looking into ways to improve the performance and functionality of the website to make the pages faster to load and easier to use for our visitors.
The Events and Festivals section at virtual-swanage.co.uk/whats-on has always been a challenging section due to repeating events causing search engine listing problems due to many repeating events causing duplicate content issues where the same page title and text are repeated on multiple pages with only the events date being different on each page.
Why this matters
Duplicate content is problematic for search engines because it makes it harder to determine which version of a page to show in search results. When there are multiple pages with the same or very similar content, search engines struggle to identify the original or most relevant version, which can lead to lower rankings for all the duplicate pages. This can dilute the visibility of the content and may even result in search engines ignoring some versions altogether. For website owners, duplicate content can also mean a wasted "crawl budget," as search engines spend time processing repeated information instead of unique, valuable content. Ultimately, duplicate content confuses search engines and users, reducing the chances of pages ranking well and attracting traffic.
How we have solved this problem
To resolve these problems we have have changed the way we store and display events at Virtual Swanage.
In the past we stored one event entry for each date which lead to the duplicate issues.
With this new update we are now storing a single instance of the events information and storing multiple dates which are linked to the event details. This now allows us to show a single unique page for each event and if there are multiple dates for the event it shows a list of dates on the page.
For recurring events such as weekly club meetings or other regular social events, we now have the option to assign a weekly repeating day(s) to each event and this will now show the event on every week until an expiry date which can be set many years ahead if required.
How do I promote my event?
You can add your event for free to the Virtual Swanage website by submitting your events details using the form atvirtual-swanage.co.uk/new/addevent