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Live sites will get badly damaged if such this happens. Consider the cases of Sports live score sites, Online chat frames, News feeds, etc. So mostly this won't damage the SEO factors.

Micha, After looking at your site and running a few quick tests, I still don't think your site has been penalized. You have a few technical and on-page issues to deal with, but I don't think fixing these alone will catapult you to the top of the SERPs. I checked the SERPs for "climb kilimanjaro," and I think your competition is your biggest hurdle. In addition to being around a lot longer, your competitor's websites have far more targeted, editorial backlinks, and consequently much higher authority, than your site. Unfortunately, there's no quick and easy fix for this problem. You'll have to work toward earning good backlinks.  Check out the resources below. https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-guide/link-building-earning/ http://www.linkbuildingbook.com/

Thanks for your responses. I'm not too worried about users finding these sitemaps as they only appear very far into the search results. The only worry I had was that these pages could be seen as low-quality/thin pages of content. I guess David-Kley's suggestion of naming the images properly could kill two birds with one stone; Have relevant content indexed on these pages and perhaps attract a few more visitors through google image search. Thanks for the suggestion!

Basically that wouldn't affect anything, I do that myself all the time. But if I were the guy at Google, who has to manually reconsider your request to drop a penalty and I read "SEO company" in the footer section I wouldn't be too generous with your request. That is more or less a "psychological" factor, so I would rather call that link: Webdesign & Consulting: biggestleaf. But that is no proven factor, just my 2 cents to how I think somebody at GooglePlex could react..