Photopost Pro Canonical Links Tag for SEO
 

The problem: Duplicate content

One of the biggest problems of Photopost Pro when aiming at SEO-optimization is duplicate content - myriads of possible urls point to the same page. This leads to heavy penalization by search engines like Google. Although this has been critizised for years by Photopost customers, the developers were less than helpful, stating this was not "an issue with our program at all"; there are no indications whatsoever that this will ever be addressed.

A solution: canonical links

Not long ago, the major search engines (including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) introduced a new tag, designed to deal with just that problem. It allows you to define a canonical url for pages that can be accessed via various urls. This is just what Photopost needs and should really help SEO-wise (see Googles explanation):
<link rel="canonical" href="URL" />

What this product does

I wrote a small plugin that is only active on Photopost's showphoto.php, this being the most important and most duplicated page. It extracts the photonumber from the URL and constructs a canonical url that is made up only from the URL to the script and one parameter (the photo number). It works with both Photopost's URL versions (standard and spider-friendly). Additionally, if the URL that was used to call the page is not identical to the canonical URL, a "noindex"-Tag will be added.

Example:

URL to call the page:

Code:

---

http://www.roma-antiqua.de/forum/galerie/showphoto.php?photo=15

---

will insert:

Code:

---

<link rel="canonical" href="http://roma-antiqua.de/forum/galerie/showphoto.php?photo=15" />

---

while

URL to call the page:

Code:

---

http://www.roma-antiqua.de/forum/galerie/showphoto.php?photo=15&ppuser=1

---

will insert

Code:

---

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
<link rel="canonical" href="http://roma-antiqua.de/forum/galerie/showphoto.php?photo=15" />

---

Installation

• import the product
• if you're using Template Management System, you're done. Otherwise, add $cel_photopost_canonical at the top of your headinclude template.

Reserved

will be back soon.

Good to know... :D

Hi, sounds great, so the plug-in is only active for the photopost urls within my forums. I have links from all members profiles as well as their posts to their photopost pictures..??

** installed as of now **

I'm not really sure what you mean, I'll try an answer anyway :)
No, this plugin is not active in the forums at all. It is only active on showphoto.php in your Photopost gallery. There it inserts the tags inside the page header. You won't see any difference at all when looking at the page in your browser, it's only in the page source. It's for the search engine spiders.

That's of no interest for this mod, and this mod will not affect them. It only tells the search engines that there is one page [the canonical one], that can be addressed via different URLS. So the search engine knows that it is not duplicate content and won't penalize you.

You may want to read the explanation on Google Blog I linked to in the first post.

Good one, thank you.

Works on Photopost 6.1 as well...

Thanks, it is a shame that PP don't try and enhance there version more for vb users in general. with all these new vbulletin updates it is starting to make the PP obsolete on my site.

Same here. I wonder how long it will take them to adapt their product to vB4. Scott Molinari hinted on vB-germany that there might be a full-blown gallery coming from Jelsoft somewhere in the future - if that's to happen, I'm a sure buyer. Hell, if that new taxonomy system coming with vB4 is any good, perhaps the albums can be modded into some kind of gallery. I'm actually looking forward to try that :D

I think most will be buyers. Especially photopost users. Thanks for this plugin!

Quick question, but does vbgallery work in the same way and does it require a similar solution to PhotoPost Pro? If so, will you be making a mod for vbgallery as well?

Probably - I'm not that familiar with vBG. Though I doubt that the problem can be as bad as with Photopost. ;) I have vbseo installed and the SEO-gurus there have up to now not been able to handle Photopost - that's how bad it is :(. There is a plugin for vBG, tho. And no, I won't do something for vBG. As I said, I don't use it myself, and with vbseo there is a excellent product available for SEOing.

At least the current db schema and code seems to make it pretty easy to build a gallery type addon based on (album) pictures - if I only had enough time ...

*Sigh* ;)

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

that's gooooood

thank youuu very mucccccch

How exactly do i install this? Thx!

Just as it says in the first post:
For the first step:
AdminCP -> Plugins & Products -> Manage Products -> Add / import product (at the bottom of the page). Then import the xml-file you downloaded.

For the second step:
AdminCP -> Styles & Templates -> Style Manager -> Choose appropriate style -> All Style options -> headinclude -> add $cel_photopost_canonical at the top.

well, that couldn't have been easier. Very nice!

Easy to install. Thanks!

If you're running the vBSEO Sitemap Generator:

Thank you cellarius!

This is a very nice and easy fix to one of the worst issues with PP that they will never fix. Marked installed.

I have one question/request though. I have the spider-friendly URLs on, but I used to have a sitemap generator that produced the sitemap with the standard URLs (showphoto.php?photo=XXX). As a result, I have a lot of photos indexed with both versions. This plugin as is works with both, which means it will produce a canonical URL for each version. Is there a way to make this check which type of URL is selected in the admin options of PP, and then produce only that format of canonical URL?

For instance, if you have spider friendly URLs active, and a search engine visits a showphoto.php?photo=XXX page, the noindex meta would be inserted along with the canonical URL as showphoto.php/photo/XXX ? That would be excellent if its possible. Either way, you've managed to do more than PP has for years with this one little plugin.

Hi cellarius
sorry for my dumb arse question but would this work for Vbgallery (made by photopost)
i know it says photopost pro just trying my luck here ;)

Cheers

That would be possible, but for your problem I'd say it would be the wrong path. In your place, I'd decide which URL I want to use, and then implement a 301-redirect via htaccess to redirect the other. This way, you get the "wrong" URLs out of the search engines.

Cool, thanks. Is there any way to check if this works after we install it, and somehow check the results after a few days/weeks on google somehow?

Of course. Just check the html source code in your browser. The meta tag will be visible there.
Use Google Webmaster tools. There you can get information on how many and which pages are listed in the Google index.

As you said: Photopost Pro, not vBG.

I actually tried that before, but I couldn't come up with any redirect rules that would accomplish it.

Have to uninstall this because of this issue.

Any idea what causes this error?

I cannot reproduce this and have not the slightest clue how this mod would cause this. It does not even touch anything inside Photopost; it's only active in the vB wrapper, and there only inserts one line into the html head based on the URL used to call the page. Not even the picutreid is taken from PP but determined from the variable. In fact, none of the PP stuff is even available or active for my plugin - it's all out of scope. It's basically the same as if you wrote a line of text into the template directly - that would not break a menu.

i was about to install this today but i found out its already integrated in the new photopost 7