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