I have a website made to provide free web-based tools for making indie games. Currently, it only supports artists contributing to games. The features for helping artists consist of a set of artist community tools that allow artists to upload images based on a description, then we post that image in a gallery page. Other artists can upload their images and each image can have several revisions.
The way I chose to implement the image upload and display feature is by serializing uploaded images to a byte array and storing it in the database. When I need to display the image in the UI I just call a controller action I named “GetScaledGalleryImage” and pass in the image ID. That controller action takes the binary from the database and converts it back into an image, returning the requested image back.
This works very well functionally, but the problem I realized later is that the google crawler thinks all of my images are named “GetScaledGalleryImage” so if someone searches for “sylph” on google images, nothing comes up from my site, but if someone searches for site:watermintstudios.com getscaledgalleryimage, all of my images come up.
Here is an example of the URL that is being output in my HTML http://watermintstudios.com/EarnAMint/GetScaledMedia/68?scale=128
In the past, pre-MVC I would handle 404 errors and return content based on what was requested even if the page didn’t actually exist. This would of course allow me to have the images pulled back by the image name (or description).
Is that the best way to do this? Or is there a better option? Something simpler would be better like if I could just do http://watermintstudios.com/EarnAMint/GetScaledMedia/Iris%20Doll?id=68&scale=128, but based on how google indexes images, would that give me what I need? Or do I need to provide image file extensions for maximum indexability?
Thanks all
It is important when doing Search Engine Optimization to always use
alt="this is a crazy robot"for your images. This will help the crawler identify them. Note: always use alt, don’t always name your images this is a crazy robot.