I wrote a little plugin for vBulletin to help with Photopost SEO issues.

The plugin is available at vbulletin.org

I hope it's ok to post this pointer here, if not, please move or delete. I thought, since Photopost has been an issue around here, this might be of interest for some of you. And I'd really like to hear some opinions - will that have impact, SEOwise?

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.