Duplicate content created by website Calendar - A Penalty?

[Bill_K]

A colleague of mine asked me a question about duplicate content coming from their event calendar. I don't think this will affect them negatively, but I would love some feedback and thoughts. ThanksOne of my clients, LifeTech Academy, is using my RavenTools software. Raventools has reported a HUGE amount of duplicate content (4.4K instances).The duplicate content all revolves around their calendar and repeating events (http://lifetechacademy.org/events/)The question is this - will this impact their SEO efforts in a negative way?

[Bill_K]

Thanks so much for the quick response. I will pass along the information.

Have a great day.

[EGOL]

I have a little experience with Panda on one of my sites.  I had republished content distributed to me from government agencies and universities.   I also had a blog with a lot of very short posts.  When you get hit, the hit is sitewide.  The rankings of all of your pages drop.  I was lucky and escaped quickly.

That calendar is risky in my opinion.  The event pages can be indexed.  If it was my site that calendar would have been yanked off ten seconds after I clicked into it.  I would feel great about yanking it off.

If you want to keep the calendar the event pages should be noindex follow.  I gave you a suggestion above that might turn the calendar into a traffic-pulling, link-attracting asset instead of a risk.

[Bill_K]

I appreciate your feedback. Since this isn't my client officially, and if they wanted to keep the calendar, do you think they would be penalized by Google?

I agree with you, but would like to get your thoughts.

Thanks

[EGOL]

If this was my website, I would get rid of this calendar or use it in a different format.

The calendar is generating a lot of extra pages with almost no content.   I have done a lot of work since the first Panda to get rid of single pages with almost no content.  I believe that they are Panda bait, suck power out of the rest of your site.

Instead of a calendar like this I would make a big long page with events and their descriptions listed.  Depending upon how it is optimized and the amount of traffic in the space, that page could pull in a lot of traffic, become a "go to page" for many people, and even be linkbait.