Spider Friendly URLs are not 100% spider-friendly.

[LBmtb]

I'm gonna have to agree with the others who claim that PhotoPost creates duplicate content issues. At least 90% of the pages from my website that are in the supplemental index are photopost pages. I'm talking thousands of PP pages in supplemental from my site.

Today I started doing some modifying which will include modifying the way PP does meta description and keyword tags, adding robot meta tags, some redirects, and a few other things.

Just an example of what the problem is. Go to: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...or+the+huck%22 and then click on "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 4 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

12 of those 13 results are supplemental and of the EXACT SAME PHOTO PAGE. Google IS NOT merely disregarding duplicates and regarding one single page as the 'correct one' and putting that into the regular index. They're ALL going into supplemental.

Sure there is subtle functionality gained with all those variations in the URLs but that functionality isn't even user-friendly. As a user myself I find it frustrating when I'm at a photo page and the navigation for next/previous photos changes depending on how I got to that page.

[BrentWilson]

Duplicate urls are a huge problem with photopost.

My robots.txt for photopost is as follows:

Content visible to verified customers only.

Those lines have blocked over 6300 duplicate photopost urls.

Check out the urls here if you don't believe me: http://www.mustangevolution.com/phot...licateurls.txt

[ScottW]

Even though it's been said many times that Google recognizes dynamic duplicate content and doesn't penalize for it, we're happy to build a fix for this into the next release. We'd appreciate your feedback as to the implementation you'd like to see: meta noindex tags on all duplicate pages for instance?

[BrentWilson]

Google's algorithms are not perfect and contrary to what they believe they can't successfully identify ever piece of duplicate content and then discard the correct one(s) instead of the one you want indexed.

Meta noindex tags would be a great start. Maybe a look at whether some of these urls are even needed? Some of them in my URL list really make no sense to me.

[just_me]

Originally Posted by BrentWilson

Duplicate urls are a huge problem with photopost.

My robots.txt for photopost is as follows:

Content visible to verified customers only.

Those lines have blocked over 6300 duplicate photopost urls.

Check out the urls here if you don't believe me: http://www.mustangevolution.com/phot...licateurls.txt

Thanks for posting this, it will save me a lot of time. I use phpBB for my forum and after I blocked all the duplicates and unnecessary pages like user profiles, my forum skyrocketed in rankings per content on the SERPS. I'm currently using phpBB for my classifieds solely because each classified gets indexed properly in a hurry and stays. I'm moving to Photopost Classifieds to get more functionality but I can see this will be a long road with having to hack a lot after each update.

I don't think the developers should take any offense to criticism of this nature. I know many brilliant developers who are quite in the dark as to proper SEO. It's obvious there is SEO issues and I would consider improving this in an upcoming update as a priority in terms of the value of your software. SEO out of the box is a HUGE seller.

My .02 - don't spend it all at once.

[Michael P]

There are already alot of rel="nofollow" links in the latest PhotoPost; I'll do more checking, but most of the big ones should already be covered.

Not to mention our unique ability to turn spiderings urls on and off is a huge bonus that I haven't seen on any other product.

[LBmtb]

Originally Posted by Michael P

There are already alot of rel="nofollow" links in the latest PhotoPost; I'll do more checking, but most of the big ones should already be covered.

Not to mention our unique ability to turn spiderings urls on and off is a huge bonus that I haven't seen on any other product.

nofollow links are cool but are merely a bandaid on the gaping SEO wound of duplicate content for PhotoPost.

Spider-friendly URL's are okay but is like trying to put icing on a moldy cake. Make the underlying structure/architecture work well for SEO first then try to do things like spider-friendly URL's.

We're not criticizing you or other PhotoPost developers in terms of how the software package works because in my experience it's worked pretty well. But SEO-wise it's a joke.

I for one would be happy to see PhotoPost developers

1. take a step back
2. read what we're saying
3. realize that PhotoPost isn't God's gift to vBulletin
4. take note of the SEO problems
5. admit to those problems
6. fix those problems

This would make for a better PhotoPost product and happier customers in the future.

[Michael P]

It took me all of 20 seconds to get through #4 in the list and in that time of reflection I decided that #5 and #6 were immaterial to my well being.

Of that time, most of it was spent on #3; mostly because I felt it interrupted the flow of an otherwise creative process. I had to reflect on the God portion and just what His role was in getting PhotoPost to this level and did God really intend for His work to be a gift to vBulletin. In some sense, maybe He did because He gave me these abilities and so many in a bigger picture of things it is indeed God's gift not just to vBulletin, but to all our users. Phew. Deep breath. Release.

Thank you for that suggestion of reflection; I feel much better for it.

[just_me]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

nofollow links are cool but are merely a bandaid on the gaping SEO wound of duplicate content for PhotoPost.

Spider-friendly URL's are okay but is like trying to put icing on a moldy cake. Make the underlying structure/architecture work well for SEO first then try to do things like spider-friendly URL's.

We're not criticizing you or other PhotoPost developers in terms of how the software package works because in my experience it's worked pretty well. But SEO-wise it's a joke.

I for one would be happy to see PhotoPost developers

1. take a step back
2. read what we're saying
3. realize that PhotoPost isn't God's gift to vBulletin
4. take note of the SEO problems
5. admit to those problems
6. fix those problems

This would make for a better PhotoPost product and happier customers in the future.

Couldn't have been said better.

[Crow]

Originally Posted by LBmtb

nofollow links are cool but are merely a bandaid on the gaping SEO wound of duplicate content for PhotoPost.

Spider-friendly URL's are okay but is like trying to put icing on a moldy cake. Make the underlying structure/architecture work well for SEO first then try to do things like spider-friendly URL's.

We're not criticizing you or other PhotoPost developers in terms of how the software package works because in my experience it's worked pretty well. But SEO-wise it's a joke.

I for one would be happy to see PhotoPost developers

1. take a step back
2. read what we're saying
3. realize that PhotoPost isn't God's gift to vBulletin
4. take note of the SEO problems
5. admit to those problems
6. fix those problems

This would make for a better PhotoPost product and happier customers in the future.

I 2nd or 3rd :P this! Been a customer for years and complained about this for about as long.

[Michael P]

Not an endorcement, but I see someone is releasing a product similiar to vBSEO that they claim supports PhotoPost:

http://www.nuhit.com/en/nuseo-features.html