vBulletin LTS

Photopost Pro Canonical Links Tag for SEO
Mod Version: 1.00, by cellarius

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 http://www.photopost.com/forum/photopost-pro-suggestions/136834-when-do-we-get-only-1-url-1-photo.html, 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 (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html):
<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 http://www.vbulletin-germany.org/index.php?t=24, you're done. Otherwise, add $cel_photopost_canonical at the top of your headinclude template.