Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
New properties for virtual, postponed, and canceled events
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
In the current environment and status of COVID-19 around the world, many events are being canceled, postponed, or moved to an online-only format. Google wants to show users the latest, most accurate information about your events in this fast-changing environment, and so we've added some new, optional properties to our
developer documentation
to help. These properties apply to all regions and languages. This is one part of our overall efforts in
schema updates
to support publishers and users. Here are some important tips on keeping Google up to date on your events.
Update the status of the event
The schema.org
eventStatus
property sets the status of the event, particularly when the event has been canceled, postponed, or rescheduled. This information is helpful because it allows Google to show users the current status of an event, instead of dropping the event from the event search experience altogether.
If the event has been canceled
: Set the
eventStatus
property to
EventCancelled
and keep the original date in the
startDate
of the event.
If the event has been postponed (but the date isn't known yet)
: Keep the original date in the
startDate
of the event until you know when the event will take place and update the
eventStatus
to
EventPostponed
. The
startDate
property is required to help identify the unique event, and we need the date original
startDate
until you know the new date. Once you know the new date information, change the
eventStatus
to
EventRescheduled
and update the
startDate
and
endDate
with the new date information.
If the event has been rescheduled to a later date
: Update the
startDate
and
endDate
with the relevant new dates. Optionally, you can also mark the
eventStatus
field as
EventRescheduled
and add the
previousStartDate
.
If the event has moved from in-person to online-only
: Optionally update the
eventStatus
field to indicate the change with
EventMovedOnline
.
For more information on how to implement the
eventStatus
property, refer to the
developer documentation
.
Mark events as online only
More events are shifting to online only, and we're actively working on a way to show this information to people on Google Search. If your event is happening only online, make sure to use the following properties:
Set the location to the
VirtualLocation
type.
Set the
eventAttendanceMode
property to
OnlineEventAttendanceMode
.
For more information on how to implement the
VirtualLocation
type, refer to the
developer documentation
.
Note
: You can start using
VirtualLocation
and
eventAttendanceMode
even though they are still under development on Schema.org.
Update Google when your event changes
After you make changes to your markup, make sure you
update Google
. We recommend that you
make your sitemap available automatically through your server
. This is the best way to make sure that your new and updated content is highlighted to search engines as quickly as possible.
If you have any questions, let us know through the
Webmasters forum
or on
Twitter
.
Posted by Emily Fifer, Event Search Product Manager
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