For those that create Joomla websites, you may find the need for an image gallery on a linked menu item page. There are several free quick and simple image gallery plugins available for Joomla including Simple Image Gallery, Ozio Gallery, and SIGE which allow you to easily display a gallery of images using a beautiful JavaScript fancy box by calling an image gallery into a Joomla article or module.
Unfortunately, most Joomla image galleries are unable to display Google image ALT tags when image galleries load on a webpage. This is because Googlebot blocks the JavaScript and other loaded files in the Joomla Plugin and Modules directories by default (controlled in robots.txt) of which where the image galleries are called to get loaded from.
If you are trying to create an image gallery on a Joomla page and Google Index the images in the gallery with correct ALT-Tags, here is the solution. Follow the steps below.
my-image-name-here.jpg
Settings: Gallery -> Image Sorting -> Random
Settings: Original Image -> Resize Images -> YES
{gallery}folder{/gallery}
You should see ALT and TITLE tags loaded on page. That’s great – just what we wanted to happen. Note: Even though Google suggests ALT tag format this way, there is no known impact in regards to SEO by using a “-” separator between words for ALT tags.
Now, if we were to index this same webpage to Google (fetch in Google Webmaster tools), here is what would happen.
Googlebot gets blocked from loading the thumbnail JavaScript images from the plugin_sige folder. So, we need to allow Googlebot to load this.
Allow: /plugins/content/sige/plugin_sige/
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