Do I have to be worried about listing my events on third-party sites with the same content?

[CleanEdisonInc]

Hello everyone,

We run classes and we just released our 2014 schedule.

I am thinking of manually posting each class on the various event sites on the web (zvents, eventbrite, yelp, etc.)

Should I worry about any sort of penalty if the content of these events are exactly the same?

Also, some allow links within the description, my plan was to have 1-3 links going back to my product page with varying anchor text. Is there anything I should worry about with this plan?

Thanks in advance for any help

[TakeshiYoung]

I've used various directory sites such as Zvents with no problems. If you can, try to use a different description on the event site than you do on your own site, this will keep your site from running into duplicate content issues, as well as help the content on the event sites get indexed.

Including links is somewhat risky in the post-Penguin world. You should be fine as long as you don't overdo it, but sites like Zvents will syndicate their event listings to dozens of other sites, so you can quickly end up with a bunch of links pointing to your site. If you're worried about Penguin, using the URL as a link is a pretty safe approach. Just don't be spammy about it and go submitting those links to hundreds of sites, they probably don't carry much link value anyway.