SEO Upgrades
We've made a variety of upgrades to the platform to improve your site's organic reach:
We're creating pagination for all event collections. Our endless scroll (and "view more" functionality) was making it difficult for Google's bots to crawl through our content. So, we're replacing the "View More" buttons on all event collections with a more traditional "Previous Page" and "Next Page" model to optimize the SEO of your events. You'll be able to see this change live on your site tomorrow.
We appended two links to your featured stuff: "(City) Venues" and "Artists In (City)" in order to make the content of these pages (i.e. - all of your venue and artist pages) more accessible to Google. Placing these links on your home page tells Google that they are important - and helps their bots locate all of your quality content much more easily.
Please note that you can still upload up to 10 'Featured Stuff' links - and these last 2 links will be automatically tacked on to the end of the list.
We're also adding canonical URLs to metro map pages as well as venue pages' 'past' and 'month' event collections. This is in an effort to disclose to Google any duplicate pages on our site (for which we are punished if not disclosed). One more way to make our SEO win.
Bug Fixes
By incredibly popular demand, we have implemented four new features to rapidly improve the speed of indexing (specifically with new venues). One of content managers' biggest pain points over the past few weeks has been the speed with which a new venue is indexed in our system. After a new venue is created, users have to wait for it to appear in search before they can add any events to the venue - so it is reasonable that CMs (and site users) want this to be as quick as possible.
In testing, these new improvements allowed the average index to complete in 10x the usual speed - and we trust that you will also see a remarkable change on your site. Please also note that the indexing speeds will continue to improve as we complete the migration to our new search provider, Algolia, by the end of the month.
The "Winners Notified" and "X of Y Confirmed" notices on Radmin giveaways will be fixed (as of tomorrow). Please note that the "X of Y Confirmed" notice will only appear if a number is entered into the "Slots" field during giveaway setup.
Cool Stuff
We made sure that users who register for your site (via the traditional registration window) have the "Send me a weekly email" box checked by default. This should result in more email addresses for all of us.
We're adjusting our auto-cropping feature for event cover photos to focus on multiple faces rather than just one specific face. This will help keep the focus on the face and off the crotch for bands with multiple members people in them.
We're hiding the calendar view from metro home pages (until we can figure out how to make it work). Between slow loads, weird navigation and time-out issues, this feature was causing more trouble than it was worth - so we are going to keep it hidden until we can figure out how to implement it properly.
In addition to the aforementioned updates, Dev has also been making a ton of strides forward in developing the mobile app - which we will have in all of your iPhones shortly.
Tip Of The Week
A quick tip and reminder that all the elements of your Facebook posts' preview text are editable -
not just the top headline.
Be sure to remind your interns that they can click into any of this text to change it around.
It's important to customize these pieces of copy as much as possible to maximize engagement with your Facebook posts and to give your social media that human touch.
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