Making EventSpot events hidden from search engine crawlers

[NicoleA224]

My organization recently had an event disrupted by protesters due to the sensitive nature of a main issue, and it looked really bad for us. Turns out, they found our event through a Google Alert, which led directly to the page. They registered a couple of fake names, planted themselves in the event, and the rest is history.

So, this is a major privacy issue. Currently, EventSpot allows you to keep events off the calendars. Would it be possible to offer the option for events to be private from search engines, as well? In my personal experience, this involves robots.txt modifications, and a meta tag - nothing complicated. But, EventSpot users can't access those features.

I appreciate your response!

[NicoleA224]

My organization recently had an event disrupted by protesters due to the sensitive nature of a main issue, and it looked really bad for us. Turns out, they found our event through a Google Alert, which led directly to the page. They registered a couple of fake names, planted themselves in the event, and the rest is history.

So, this is a major privacy issue. Currently, EventSpot allows you to keep events off the calendars. Would it be possible to offer the option for events to be private from search engines, as well? In my personal experience, this involves robots.txt modifications, and a meta tag - nothing complicated. But, EventSpot users can't access those features.

I appreciate your response!

[Hannah_M]

Hi Nicole,

I am sorry to hear of your experience but appreciate the detail. We don't have a way to hide it fully at this time except by hiding it from calendars and social sites. I would also recommend not using keywords as these are searchable. You could hide all event fees and details and only allow people with a special access code to register. This isn't ideal but would make it very hard for someone outside the event to register.

 This is great feedback for us for teh future though so thanks again for sharing.