Good to hear from you again, and thanks for your question.
I am far from an expert on SEO, but my understanding is that when search engines request the page for analysis, WordPress runs the shortcodes and returns the results as part of the page content. That means the “dynamically displayed gallery” looks like any other content on the page.
Plugins like Yoast SEO analyze page content to generate “social tags” and other data they can add to the page headers, etc. for use by search engines. Here is a link to an earlier support topic along similar lines:
Pull Featured Image from MLA Gallery
Thanks for posting the link to “Content Analysis with the WordPress SEO plugin”. It looks like this article explains how Yoast SEO tries to analyze post content to prepare “social tags”, etc. The [mla_gallery]
and [mla_tag_cloud]
shortcodes play by the rules and do not have any of the ugly side-effects described in the article. I am not quit sure how to use the wpseo_pre_analysis_post_content
filter described in the article but when I have some time I will investigate how MLA might use it. I will leave this topic unresolved and post an update when I have more information.
Thanks for an interesting suggestion and for your continued interest in the plugin.