Any URI with 'calendar' is denied for all known bots/crawlers

It is "by design" denied in the config: http://drupalcode.org/project/barracuda.git/blob/HEAD:/aegir/conf/nginx_...

However, we should probably improve this to not affect URLs like this, and only lock the access for bots where it is really required.

It could be overridden in that custom config only of you will define there more specific location path, so something more than just 'calendar'.

I've got about a dozen posts that all include the word "event" in the title. It's the same problem. I'd tried fixing it by putting the following into nginx_vhost_include.conf

location ~* /blog/.*event {
  try_files $uri @cache;
}

It's not working. Can anybody explain to me how to fix it so that it will actually allow Google to index these posts?

Thanks,
-Joseph

You would need to use parent location with literal string matching to terminate it at this point, so it should be:

location ^~ /blog/ {
  location ~* /blog/.*event {
    try_files $uri @cache;
  }
  try_files $uri @cache;
}

More information: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location

Or just:

location ^~ /blog/ {
  try_files $uri @cache;
}

The same thing is happening to me, Googlebot won't connect to my /calendar-list page which shows events from 2012. Any quick way to fix this?

You need to edit the nginx_vhost_include.conf file and add an exception to allow the pages you want. I'm just guessing based on what you wrote, that /calendar-list is the only page you need to fix. If so, try the following:

location ^~ /calendar-list {
  try_files $uri @cache;
}

The point is to make a positive match on the url (the first line) and tell it to serve the page to everybody (the second line). The first line might have to be different, depending on exactly what the url structure is.

You can read about how to construct that line to make a positive match at the link omega8cc posted above: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#location

-Joseph

P.S. You'll need to reload nginx after saving your changes to the nginx_vhost_include.conf file.
P.P.S. Grace, thanks for your help. I got my problem fixed, obviously.

You can still add it (optionally) but you no longer need to do anything to remove it - we have removed this filtering in HEAD: http://drupalcode.org/project/barracuda.git/commit/cbe894a