What Everybody Ought to Know About Events & Google My Business
In this Guide
- ?How to deal with events in your knowledge panel
- ?Does an event qualify for a Google My Business listing
How to deal with events in your knowledge panel
Google sometimes shows events in the Knowledge Panel for businesses, like this example for Folly Farm:
Where do they show up?
According to Krystal Taing, These were temporarily removed in 2020 due to COVID. They only show up now on Google search and not at all on Google Maps or the Google Maps app. They were removed from Google Maps in March 2020.
Where does Google get event details from?
Events show up generally because they are scraped from the website and automatically added to the knowledge panel. There are lots of opportunities for this to go wrong which is why we suggest constantly monitoring it. In this example, a business owner had their competitors showing up in this section on their knowledge panel.
What to do if there is an incorrect event in your knowledge panel
Sometimes Google will remove incorrect events if you contact GMB support. In this example, a business owner was able to get one removed that was pointing to a hacked website that had completely incorrect information on it.
Tim Capper has written a couple of articles on this feature and how to influence it.
Does an event qualify for a Google My Business listing
A little-known fact is that sometimes an event can qualify for a Google My Business (GMB) listing. This was brought up to the Google My Business team sometime around 2017 (I can’t recall the exact year) and was also brought up to the Google Maps team by several product experts there. To qualify to have a GMB listing for an event, the main criteria Google would need are:
- The event needs to re-occur annually (or more frequently)
- There has to be some history of the event. For example, if you said to Google “I’m starting this new event and we’re definitely going to do it every year” you will have a harder time convincing them of that when compared to an event that has already been happening once a year for a few years.
- The event has to always be at the same location (the location used for the address on Google Maps).
An example of an event that would qualify for a listing would be the Toronto Auto Show (https://autoshow.ca/contact/) or the Pride parade.
I take it that GMB event posts are not shown in that format?
No, they show up in the posts section.
The event panel is great to show some awesome stuff that’s coming up to your business. But the disadvantage of it is that it also creates events from information on third party websites. And this information is not always correct.
In my case a garden centre hosted a Christmas fair. For this event where traffic controllers needed. The organisation behind the traffic controllers created an eventpage on their website. All the information (with different opening times) were visible on the knowledge panel of the garden centre in the event section.
In the event panel wasn’t any option to change information of the event. In my opinion it would be very useful if there is a “propose changes” option available.
For the listings I manage, events are pulled from website content but it’s also common to see info pulled from Facebook, Eventbrite and Meetup – and unfortunately also websites that scrape event information from Facebook and repost it (but don’t seem to scrape again for updates!), which definitely requires constant monitoring!
In my experience, events were still showing up in GMB listings in 2020 and on March 30, 2020 GMB added a banner that said, “Event information may be out of date due to the coronavirus (COVID-19). Confirm details with event organizers.” which was helpful!
Interesting that you don’t mention event schema. That’s almost a given for having your event show up in organic results and if the page has organization schema and an active knowledge graph it’s likely to show the events there too.
The two articles I linked to from Tim Capper show you how to implement the schema. Instead of writing what he already wrote about – I just linked to his articles 🙂
We are managing a profile for an outdoor event that reoccur each year since 15+ years. We’re talking 75k visitor on a single weekend – each year. Listing was suspended recently. Is there any documentation or link available so we can make sure to :
1) Work inline with the guidelines
2) Send a reinstatement request with a link to the information that show that an event may qualify for a listing?
You can definitely send them this article. They don’t really have much publicly that you can reference in the help center as this is really an edge case (doesn’t happen often). If you run into issues, I’d suggest posting on the Google Business Profile forum.