What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?

[Ron10]

what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?  My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about.  Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google?  I'm not really sure.   He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users.  This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site.  I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions.  Thoughts anyone?

Thanks!

Ron

[Chris.Menke]

Ron,

Go ahead and create your new gallery and 301 redirect the old gallery pages to the main page of your new gallery and you'll be fine.  I can't think of any real good reason your old SEO would claim doing it like that would be a big benefit to you.

[CleverPhD]

Look at your analytics data.  If you have text around each of your photos (descriptions etc) on those pages then you are probably ranking for a bunch of long tail terms on these pages and would see traffic to a bunch of different pages.  If you find that most of your traffic only goes to your main page, then you are probably ok.

The potential impact of removing the pages would be that you would remove all of the referral traffic coming to those individual pages and so that traffic would go away.

You can probably still setup a thumbnail gallery to all of your image pages and then link out.   Take a look at the way USA today has you browse articles on the site (click the arrows on the sides, but watch the URL bar).  It feels like you are just flipping through images/page, but each article has a unique url etc.  Clever way of combining interface and site structure.

Good luck!

[gfiorelli1]

Your SEO maybe is not aware that now Google Images doesn't really drive that traffic it was used before for the simple fact that you can see the image (and "steal it") directly from Google.

Said that, creating a single page for every single photo can be tricky if not done properly.

If you don't provide a text description of the photo, apart the title and the alt text, all those pages are going to be extremely similar one each other, so much that you could fall into a substantial duplicated issue.

Finally, think to the users: clicking back and forward from one image page to the other is good? Personally I have my doubts.

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Ron10,

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If not, please ask for more specific answers

[seoFan21]

Hello,

I came across this question when trying to find a solution for a similar question.  One of my clients has an event coming up where they will have multiple photo galleries.  The images within the photo galleries will have titles and descriptions and one image can potentially show up in more than one photo gallery.

In this case, would you recommend implementing canonical tags?  If not, anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance!