SEO friendly URL while using Timthumb

Question

My website www.uksoccershop.com has been recently updated by my team to show image thumbnails using timthumb. This has been successfully done, but the issue of losing on SEO traffic from Google Images is looming high. I am afraid that Google will start indexing URLs in this manner - http://img.uksoccershop.com/timthumb.php?src=http://img.uksoccershop.com/2437.gif&h=110&w=110&zc=1&q=100 which does not look good to me.

Is it possible to use timthumb and still get the search engine to see the URL like - http://img.uksoccershop.com/2437.gif

I searched on internet and found this URL - http://revisedagain.com/2011/custom-rewrite-rules-with-wordpress-timthumb/ which handles the same requirement, but I could not get it to work in my case.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This .htaccess rule should do the trick:

RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)\.gif$ /timthumb.php?src=http://img.uksoccershop.com/$1.gif&h=110&w=110&zc=1&q=100