Another option? Update your cancelled or postponed events with Schema

[djbaxter]

Update your cancelled or postponed events with Schema
Yoast
March 27, 2019

The outbreak of COVID-19 led to a wave of canceled or postponed events. Some events made the switch from an offline event to an online one. As everyone is scrambling to look up the latest information on events online, it is important to have all the latest details on your website. Search engines can pick up these details and post the correct information in the search results. New Event Schema helps speed up this process.

Events structured data expanded quickly
In last week’s release of Schema.org 7.0, you can find several updates to the Events structured data. You can give your event an eventStatus of EventCancelled when it’s cancelled or an EventPostponed when it’s been postponed. In addition, you can also set a rescheduled event as EventRescheduled.

A new option is available for events that moved online: you can now update the eventStatus to EventMovedOnline. Here, you can also mark events as online-only by setting the location to VirtualLocation and set the eventAttendenceMode to OnlineEventAttendanceMode.

An example for YoastCon 2020
We had a new edition of YoastCon planned for April, 2020. As everything else, we rescheduled that to a date later in the year. I thought I’d let you see how one of these additions could look in code.

Below, you can find a part of the Schema code found on the YoastCon page. I’ve added the eventStatus, plus the corresponding EventRescheduled property. Also, I’ve added the old, plus the new date. Now, search engines know this event was rescheduled to a new date and can update the listing accordingly.

{

        "@type":"BusinessEvent",

        "@id":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#yoastcon",

        "mainEntityOfPage": {

            "@id": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/#webpage"

        }

        ,

        "name":"YoastCon",

        "description":"Due to the recent COVID-19 health concerns both locally and among our (international) speakers, we're sad to announce that we're postponing YoastCon 2020.",

        "organizer": {

            "@id": "https://yoast.com/#organization"

        }

        ,

        "startDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",

        "endDate":"2020-09-10T07:00:00+00:00",

        "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",

        "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",

      "previousStartDate": "2020-04-21T19:00",

        "url":"https://yoast.com/yoastcon/",

        "image":"https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2019/10/YoastCon2020-600x338.png",

        "location": {

           "@type":"Place",

            "name":"Theater 't Moza\u00efek",

            "url":"https://www.mozaiekwijchen.nl/",

            "address": {

                "@type": "PostalAddress",

        "addressLocality": "Wijchen",   

        "addressRegion": "Gelderland",

        "addressCountry": "The Netherlands",

        "postalCode": "6602 HX",

        "streetAddress": "Campuslaan 6"

            }

        }

Moving the event online

Many events now move to online-only, for the time being or completely. You can now let search engines know that the event has turned into an online event — or a mixed event with both an offline and an online component.

In the YoastCon example, I could move the event by adding an EventMovedOnline property, combined with a new VirtualLocation property with a link to the page where the event is happening online. Code is truncated.

"eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OnlineEventAttendanceMode",
      "eventStatus": [
        "https://schema.org/EventRescheduled",
        "https://schema.org/EventMovedOnline"
        ],
      "previousStartDate": "2020-04-22T19:00",
      "location": {
        "@type": "VirtualLocation",
        "url": "https://yoast.com/yoastcon/"

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