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!