What is the point of having images clickable loading to their own page?

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Hello,

Noticed a lot of sites, usually wordpress (seems to be the default) have the images in their posts clickable that load to their own page, showing just the image, usually a .jpg page. I know these pages seem to be easily indexed into google image search and can drive traffic to those specific pages...

My questions are...

1. What is the point of driving traffic to a page that is just the image, there are no links to other pages, no ads, nothing...

2. can you redirect these .jpg pages to the actual post page? I ask because on google image search, there are 3 links to click (website, image link, image page), when you click to view the image, it loads the .jpg page, why not have that .jpg redirect to the real content page that has ads and also has other links. Is this white-hat?

3. Do these pages with just images have any negative effect on optimization since they are just images, no content?

4. Can you monetize these .jpg pages?

5. What is the best practice? I understand there is value in traffic, but what is the point of image traffic if I can't monetize those pages?

[Thos003]

I could see linking to an image file itself as useful if the image were larger and you wanted to display it outside of a paragraph of text. Many infographics could qualify for a page of their own. The site would still benefit from traffic and from authority.

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

Wasn't looking for services, just someone to connect with and bounce ideas around. Thanks for your responses!

[FedeEinhorn]

Sorry, I do not provide SEO services/consulting. If you are looking for a SEO, you can search in the recommended companies section: http://moz.com/article/recommended

I only contribute here as a hobby and a way to learn more every day

[FedeEinhorn]

Having a link in the image linking to it's own file does not help your image to get indexed faster or added to a sitemap, at least not that I know of.

In my blog, I don't have the images linking to their file and they are indexed just fine, plus added to the image sitemap that is being generated by "xml-sitemaps" automated script.

Having the image file redirecting to the page having the post is actually serving users with different content that what Google may see, hence the penalty of the image mismatch. If Google offers a link the the image, it should load the image. That's why they also offer link to the page or clicking the image links to the page where the image is. You can read more on the "Image Mismatch" penalty here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3394137

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

You've seen/read somewhere that redirecting an image from google image search to the actual page of content rather than just the .jpg page is not allowed? Can you share that info?

I guess to add to my question... it seems that having the images clickable and brought to their own .jpg page seems that those pages are able to be added to the image sitemap and easily indexed.

My concerns are being able to get all my images, lets say 10 images per 1000 word blog post, i want those 10 images to get indexed into google image search. How do you go about doing so? I thought making them clickable to their own .jpg page was making this happen quicker since I see it going on all the time with wordpress sites....

[FedeEinhorn]

The "page" you see only the image is the image file itself, there's no page there, just the file.

Wordpress does that by default but you can simply change that default to other options they offer and it is "saved" as the default, like no link, link to another page, etc.

The only benefit of having the link to the image file is that usually images are scaled to fit into posts, and therefore someone may want to see the image in its full size, hence the link to the image file. There are also other ways to deal with that like lightboxes to display images.

You could redirect the image to the page where the image is, but that requires some coding (detecting from where your image is being requested, etc.). Doing that may also carry a penalty from Google (recently announced) called "Image mismatch".

There's no "best practice" here, the best is what you consider best for each image. Take the image scaling example I mentioned, say you post an infographic, perhaps the image is much larger than the size you have available, so it makes sense linking to the image file, so the user can see the infographic in its full size.

Hope that helps!