Getting your event into the directory

Three conditions, and only three

An event appears on the directory when it is published, marked listed, and not over. Everything else about it is presentation.

• Published means public. Before that the event page does not exist for anybody but you, and publishing requires at least one active ticket type, so a buyer cannot land on a page that cannot be bought from.
• Listed is the switch that decides whether the directory may show it. A published event that is not listed is reachable by its own link and by nothing else, which is what you want for a private party or a link-only presale.
• Not over means the event’s end time has not passed. An event that has finished drops out on its own, so the directory does not fill up with last month.

What buyers can filter by

The directory filters by city, category, date and price, and it has a free-text search over event names, venues, descriptions and tags. That is the reason the words you write matter: a search for a genre, a venue or an artist is matched against what the event page actually says, not against a hidden keyword list.

Each card shows the title, the venue, the city, the date, the from-price and whether it is sold out. The from-price is the cheapest live ticket type, so a very cheap tier that has three tickets left makes the card look cheaper than the night is; that is worth knowing before you price an early bird.

City and category pages

Every city and every category gets a page built from the same inventory: /events/lagos, /events/category/music, and the two together as /events/lagos/music. There are also a this-weekend page and a free-events page. They exist so somebody who has not chosen an event yet has somewhere to browse.

A hub is only offered to search engines once it holds at least three upcoming events. Below that it still renders and still works for a visitor who follows a link, but it is marked not for indexing: a page that says “2 events” with one of them in three weeks is a thin page, and a hundred of those is what gets a directory treated as spam. One more event in a city is what flips it.

How quickly a change shows up

Your event page is read fresh every time somebody opens it, so an edit to the title, the venue or the lineup is visible immediately. The directory is cached for thirty seconds, because it is the page every visitor lands on and the count behind it is a much more expensive query than one event. A new listing therefore can take half a minute to appear in the list, and a change to a card can take the same. It is a cache, not a delay in publishing: the event page is already live.

What gets an event into search results

The site publishes a sitemap index that names a page file plus one file per thousand listed events, and every listed event that is still upcoming appears in it with its own canonical URL. Hubs that pass the three-event gate are in the page file too. Nothing here promises a position in a search result: it tells a crawler what exists.

The practical version of that advice is the same as it is anywhere: a specific title, a real venue name, a description that says who is playing, and a poster. An event called “Lagos Party” competes with every other one; an event named for the act and the room is the page somebody finds when they search for that act.

Taking an event down

Unlisting removes an event from the directory and from the sitemap and leaves it reachable by its own link. Cancelling is the stronger action: it stops sales, voids the unused passes so nothing at the gate can admit them, and emails every buyer a claim link for a refund. Which one you want depends on whether the event is still happening.

Read next

Pricing a ticket in Lagos covers the price a card shows, and how it works covers what happens after a buyer taps through.

Other guides

• Pricing a ticket in Lagos

  What a Lagos ticket price has to cover, how the processing fee sits on top of it, and why two ticket types with their own stock sell more than one number.

• Check-in without a network

  How the gate keeps scanning with no signal: a signed pass list on the phone, admissions queued on the device, and one rule the server still enforces.