Making SimpleViewer SEO friendly
I had a issue with my images and captions not being indexed by Google and other search engines because my images were being displayed in the flash viewer SimpleViewer.
SimpleViewer Flash viewer
The solution for the problem was to create a small php script that would pull the images and caption from the gallery.xml file that SimpleViewer uses and then display them on the webpage for the spiders and non-flash viewers to see.
There are several different ways of displaying the images, but I put the PHP include command into the flashcontent DIV which you can see below.
<div id=”flashcontent”>Your browser requires JavaScript and the Flash Player to view the content on this site.
<a href=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer/”>Get Flash.</a>
<?php include(“simpleviewer-seo.php”); ?>
</div>
The code will fetch your thumbnails and captions.
You will have to change the $imgpath variable to your gallery directory.
The code also puts the first 50 characters of your caption into the image’s ALT and Title tag.
To see if the plugin is working, enter the url simpleviewer-seo.php file in your browser and you can see what it put’s out. Another way is to disable javascript in the browser and you should then see the script running rather than the SimpleViewer flash gallery.
If you need any help, feel free to send me an email.
Gallery output for non-flash browsers and spiders.
Mikael Kjellstrom
You can download the code below and try it out.
http://www.mkwebdesign.ca/codes/simpleviewer-seo.zip
This code is provided without guarantee and ’AS IS’ .
Looks awesome! Thanks!
Thanks for this technique, I’m using it on my site to make it more SEO friendly.
Hello,
I would love to use this technique of yours, however, I must be doing something wrong. I have the website below and the php output below. The output is not showing images but “X”s. the source code shows that it is not following the images and just repeats the thumbs/ folder. There are 12 “X”s and there are indeed 12 thumbs in the folder. the index.php, sv-gallery-output.php are in the /MonicaDengo folder and the thumbs are in the /MonicaDengo/Thumbs folder. I put the code you suggested into the index.php file as well.
Any insight you have would be very helpful.
Lastly, once this works, how do I tell the spiders to look at the sv-gallery-output.php to find the images? i will have numerous galleries…
Thanks so much for the help.
Ron
Website page is here:
http://www.lindareps.com/simpleviewer/page_MD_no_iframe.html
location of sv-gallery-output.php:
http://www.lindareps.com/svmanager/MonicaDengo/sv-gallery-output.php
Thanks you, it looks like a very handy script. But I’m trying to download the file, and I get to your 404 page. Is the link broken?