Image URL's have knocked my sub-pages down (WP)

[JayAdams32]

I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page.

After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page.

With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least.

So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.

[Andropenis_Australia]

So why can;t you put the images on the page, rather than have done it by using a gallery and linking to that?

Nofollowing the links may help, but the quickest/best soloution until you find a permanenet one would be to simply undo what you did then go to webmaster tools and remove the urls form the index.