Version: 1.00, by cellarius
Developer Last Online: Apr 2022
Category: Miscellaneous Hacks -
Version: 3.8.2
Rating:
Released: 04-29-2009
Last Update: 04-29-2009
Installs: 32
Uses Plugins Template Edits Auto-Templates
No support by the author.
Note on versions:
This should work with every vB-version that uses the plugin system (3.5 and above). If not, please let me know. It also should work with older versions of Photopost. I tetsted on vB 3.8.2 and Photopost 6.22.
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:
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.