How to optimize SEO value of links in a calendar

[1968Rouleur]

Hi All-

I am building a website about outdoor activities (cycling, kayaking, hiking, etc.). The site will most likely be built with either Joomla or Wordpress. A key piece of the site will be a calendar of upcoming events. The calendar will list the basic attributes of each event like date, time and location. However if an event has a webpage of it's own I will also include a link to that page in the details of the event. My question is: How can I create a calendar that will capitalize on the SEO value of the links included in the event descriptions?

I've noticed many similar sites put events into a Google calendar and then embed the Google calendar into their webpage. In that situation would Google even see any external links included in the descriptions of the events?

Thanks in advance for any input.

-Chris

[1968Rouleur]

Michael-

Thank you for that very helpful response! This provides that context that I was looking for to approach the issue. I'll report any additional findings back to this thread.

Thanks again!

-Chris

[MichaelC-15022]

Hi Chris,

With any calendar plugin or widget you're looking at, you can use the Moz toolbar's highlighter to instantly show you whether the links in the calendar, or event descriptions, are followed.  That's the first thing to check out (I don't know if Google Calendar links are or not).

Something else to look at with calendaring is that apparently it's pretty easy to get rich snippets and nice placement in the SERPs if you mark up the events with schema.org/Event markup. You'd probably want to put that markup on the individual event pages, of course, and NOT in the calendar itself.

Third consideration: you'll want to be very careful about how many clicks it is from the home page to the individual event pages, and to try to minimize that.  For instance, let's say you care about ranking for the name of a big event to be held in August 2014 now....and, to get to that event from your home page, you had to click:

• Events (then it shows March 2014 calendar)
• next month
• next month
• next month
• next month
• next month
• [name of event]

That'll flow piddly amounts of link juice to your August event's page, and your rankings will really suck.

You might address that by adding links to the next 12 or 24 months calendar pages from the main Events page...or, even better, if Events is a main nav pulldown, have each of the next 12 or 24 months in the pulldown, so that the August 2014 calendar page gets a link from every single page on your site.

Internal link juice flow can make a massive difference to rankings, indexation, etc. so pay attention to this stuff

Cheers,

Michael