Making dynamic images have static filenames

Question

My website currently has various links to a php script that generates the images dynamically. For example, the link may say "img source="/dynamic_images.php?type=pie-chart&color=red"

Obviously, this is not great for SEO. I'd like to somehow make the filenames of these links appear to be static, and use a solution (like Mod-Rewrite) to ensure that the images can still be dynamically created.

I suppose I could have something like "img src="average-profits-in-scuba-diving-industry.png?type=pie-chart&color=red" (and use Mod-Rewrite to take care of changing the filename prefix to dynamic_images.php), but I'm afraid that the search engines would shy away from the querystring on the end of the image filename.

Any solutions?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You normally use mod_rewrite to hide query strings! You can use file names like these in your pages:

/dynamic-images/pie-chart/red/average-profits-in-scuba-diving-industry-19.png

And have mod_rewrite translate them to:

/dynamic-images.php?type=pie-chart&color=red&datasrc=19

Answer 2

For your case use Mod-Rewrite and don't worry about search engines ignoring the query string.

Answer 3

You'd need something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^dynamicChart_([^_]+)_([^_]+).png dynamic_images.php?type=$1&color=$2

Using the above (if I have written it without typos) should mean that requesting dynamicChart_pie-chart_red.png should translate to dynamic_images.php?type=pie-chart&color=red

I do not think that the SRC attribute for your images are quite as important to SEO as your ALT or TITLE attributes would be.

Answer 4

mod_rewrite is one answer, but for something simple like this, it's like nukeing a building to kill a mosquito in one of the rooms. There's $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] available to extract extra path bits, e.g.

http://example.com/dynamic-images.php/pie-chart/red/average-profits

would have

$_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] = '/pie-chart/red/average-profits';

which you can then parse with:

$query = explode('/', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']);

and you end up with:

$query = array(
    0 => '',
    1 => 'pie-chart',
    2 => 'red',
    3 => 'average-profits';
);

If you don't want the .php extension exposed in the URL, you can force the web server to treat 'dynamic-images' as a PHP script with an AddHandler directive.