The idea from Andrew is nice, but my guess would be that you're targeting multiple events so that might run into issues. What you could do is add some more regular expression and make it like this:

Disallow: ^/news/events-calendar/usa$

So the "In the news" block in the Google Search results are still powered by the normal Google Search data and not necessarily by the Google News data sets. That means you sometimes can let go of all the requirements like the news-sitemaps that are required for this. Usually authority seems to be the biggest issue to get into the block. What do you consider a strong backlink profile at the moment and could you shed some light on the industry that you're in?

Well I'm pretty sure that the difference ain't in Schema.org as the differences there have nothing to do with the crawlability and the newsworthiness of the content. The first things I would focus on are making sure that Google can find new content as fast as possible and that your crawl-rate goes up. That's really important, and if you're convinced that is fixed then focus more attention on the authority part.

Both ain't easy to fix, but someday you'll get there!

Well, I wouldn't recommend doing it as from a development perspective it ain't great. But from an SEO perspective I would worry more about the other 299+ ranking factors that are out there. Basically having your CSS validated or HTML validated won't do much in 2017 for your ranking compared to all the other variables that are taken into account.

Hi Adam,

I would recommend adding your site to Google Webmaster Tools, this will give you under Diagnostics data about the Crawl statistics from Google. This will tell you:

• The number of pages crawled per day.
• Kilobytes downloaded per day.
• Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)

Which in the end will look like this provided with graphs.

Hi Scott, Interesting line of thought I must say, but unfortunately ads.txt is not a factor as there are also tons of sites out there that don't participate at all in using ads or anything of that nature that then immediately would be facing negative consequences of not using this file. I've worked for some sites that had this file up but first of all: the change that you make would be so small to dedicate just to that file that it would never ever be able to call itself a secret weapon in my opinion.