Canonical links and Header in cpg?

[Walkinman]

Hey Folks,

i'm looking at trying to improve the SEO of my site, and one of the ways is coding correct canonical links into the headers for similar pages. example from google

Code Select Expand

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish"/>

I don't know how to do this kind of thing on specific pages with a dynamic platform like cpg (or wordpress) .. the only tool I see to write anything in the header is via theme/template.html - but that would apply the code to every page, not just the intended page.

From what I understand, it's possible to do it via htaccess, but as much as I tried, I couldn't seem to do that correctly.

Is it possible at all to specify canonical pages with cpg?

Thanks.

Cheers

Carl

[phill104]

You could always try using the search facility 

http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php/topic,64647.0.html

and there are numerous other threads discussing this. Hopefully one of them will help you. Same goes for Wordpress, they have a number of extensions available to achieve this.

[Walkinman]

Hey Phil

That's great, thanks.

I'm sorry .. man, if you knew how much I use the search function here, you'd be surprised; or perhaps concerned. I do try; I'm just ignorant about all things coding. Apologies for overlooking it this time.

And I'd actually seen this before, and even installed it on my site 2 years ago .. but uninstalled it because I didn't know enough about it, at the time. I've got it up and running again now, thanks. From what I see, it doesn't let me, say, write a custom canonical meta tag for a particular album, does it?

Thank you.

Cheers

Carl

[Walkinman]

PS: the title of this thread should be, of course, "cpg" .. but I don't think I can edit it at this point.

[phill104]

No problem. Sometimes the search function requires such specific terms it is easy to not get the results you need.

[Walkinman]

hey Folks,

I'm revisiting this. As I said above, this plugin doesn't really do what I need. What I'm working on now is setting up either static html portfolio-type or gallery pages, and using coppermine for sorting all searchable files. So I'll end up with, for example, 2 galleries of Polar Bear Photos; one done either as a static html page or a wordpress gallery .. this will be my primary landing page for a particular subject.

And I'll have a full copper mine album of p-b pictures if people are looking for something more.

Here's an example.
domainname.com/polar-bear-portfolio/

domainname.com/cpg-albums/all-pb-pictures/

And I want the cpg album to have a rel=canonical tag directing google to prioritize the primary page .. I have found how to write a metatag in the head, but can't do it in cpg for specific pages. This plugin doesn't do that (or anything like it) from what I can see.

Is this possible, and how would I go about it?

Thanks so much.

Cheers

Carl

[Αndré]

So you need a fixed tag which points to ?page=1 (of just omit the "page" parameter) for each albums thumbnails (and also all intermediate-sized pictures pages of thata album?), right?

[Walkinman]

Hey André

Thanks for reply. I'm actually not sure exactly what I need. The more I've read up on it, google say canonical should be strictly canonical, meaning the page identical. Which makes sense, but to me, a page of a photo, where all the text is pretty much simply the descriptive caption and title, etc for that picture, would count as canonical. But from what i read, google says no it should be everything the same. To me, if I have 10 images of a brown bear eating salmon, there's only so many ways  I can caption those images before I repeat myself, and then start running into duplicate titles and content and so on. So I'm thinking of a way to get around that as being a rel=canonical tag that tells google which of those images to direct search traffic to .. once someone finds that image, they can search the site itself for options, and so on.

Some web masters on other forums have suggested this isn't the best way to approach it, but I'm not sure.

That all said; it would be nice to maybe a custom field that allows the author of the album page (and photo pages) to add a rel="canonical" tag if needed. I installed an SEO plugin on the wordpress section of my site that does this. I can leave it blank if need be, or add the tag to tell the search engine what page this one is a derivative of.

For my purposes, I would want that option available on both the thumbnails/album page, as well s individual pages that the thumbnail leads to.

For example, on my site:

www.skolaiimages.com/

I would want this cpg album (and each of the consecutive page - 2, page-3 and so on)
/stock/thumbnails-122-Polar-Bear-Photos.html

to have a rel="canonical" tag telling google to defer to the wordpress portfolio
/alaska-polar-bear-photos/

and as I have some of the same images in both galleries, I would want this cpg image display page
/stock/displayimage-122-6128-Polar-bear-walking-arctic-Alaska.html

to have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the same image hosted elsewhere on the site. Or, for example, 2, 3 or 4 image display pages on cpg that are very similar
/stock/displayimage-122-6693-Polar-Bear-walking-under-the-moon.html
/stock/displayimage-122-6695-Three-Polar-Bears-under-the-moon.html
/stock/displayimage-122-6696-Three-Polar-Bears-walk-under-the-moon.html

to be able to add a rel="canonical" to those pages telling google which one is the primary one.

Right now I see that page 2, page 3 and so on of the main cog thumbnails all show a rel="canonical" tag to the first page for that album.. but I also see that same tag in the source of the first page. I have no idea whether this hurts or is correct or not, but it seems that the tag should only show up on pages that are NOT the canonical page .. i.e, it's pointing to itself. Is this correct?

I'm doing my best research on how to solve some of these issues, and finding a lot of differing opinions and information, of course, so this may not be (a) correct and (b) the best approach anyway. One thing I'm trying is to use my navigation menus to simply point to the primary album page I want (such as the wordpress gallery), and then having a link to the cog collection on that page. That may be a better option, I don't know.

But it would be nice, if possible, to have a field that allows me to add a canonical tag to each album page, and/or imagedisplay page, if I need to.

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks again.

Cheers

Carl