Mid October Google took the decision to open the floodgates on Events in appearing in the businesses knowledge panel and business listing. Events appearing in the Knowledge Panel have been in existence since 2016 and in order for the businesses event to appear in the knowledge panel, a businesses needed to provide Google with event details in a structured format using Event Schema or structured data markup.

Fast forward to October 2018 and Google has opened the floodgates on event spam by adding any possible event that they can tie to a location, with or without structured data and also incorrectly reading the data.

 

Spammy Events in Knowledge Panel

10 Downing Street has been hit with a selection of irrelevant events “Example Smith & Jones Wedding” from a chefs website.

 

 

To make matters worse Google lists all six of these non events … these pages look like a template that developers must have uploaded for the chef to use.

Oh and Googlebot forgot to check the Event Structured Data Markup, if it had, they would have noticed the address used is a fictitious address listed as: 10 Downing Street Chester, Cheshire CH0 0LT

 

 

Next spammy event titled Make an Entrance Like Theresa May is pulled via a Facebook event by Plymouth Freshers as a “dance class” which would be pretty hilarious to watch, but its not an event, in fact none of them are.

 

 

Google Spams Themselves #StopCrapOnTheMap

In Google’s haste to stick anything that they can find matching an address onto a business listing they spammed themselves with a non event at Google London.

 

 

Event does not exist, but hey why not lets just shove it on, because we trust 3rd parties over businesses themselves.

 

 

More Spam from Meetup Sites

Thought it could not get worse, you’d be wrong.

In their unchecked haste they also scraped meetup sites which means that thousands of pubs, coffee shops all of a sudden have private meetups being listed as events. Japanese conversation meetup, lego builders meetup, or snowdonia weekend trip meeting place.

A meetup is a meetup NOT an event, this event spamming needs a rollback.