Last Updated on January 19, 2020 by Christopher G Mendla
If you have an image centric site, you probably wonder “How long does it take for images to get indexed”? It would be nice to keep tabs on how long it takes for your images to show up in the Google Image index. Here is a simple way to do that. UPDATED Aug 2019
How to check Google to see when your images are indexed
In the example below, I entered site:www.lbiviews.com. Then I clicked on images. You can see that a lot of images were recently added (3 days ago). The good news is that the blog post for those images was only from about 4 or 5 days ago. In other words, Google is picking up my images and indexing them rather quickly.
Simply go to Google and type site:www.yoursite.com in the searchbar. You will see the results under ‘all’. The site: command tells google to only return results for the domain indicated. Note that there will be different results for your www and non www versions of your site.
Now, click on ‘images’. You will see all of the images that Google currently has indexed for your site. Take a closer look at the bottoms of the images and you will see an indication of when the recently indexed items were added.
Now, simply search for ‘day’ in your browser when you are on the google images listing for your site. You can usually do that with a CONTROL-F
You will get a count of recently indexed images. You can use the down arrows in the search box to see which images were recently added and how long ago in days.
There are a couple of things that I do to try to get the images indexed as thoroughly and as quickly as possible.
- When I add items to a WordPress article, I make sure that I fill out the alternate text, title and other fields.
- After publishing an article, I post it to social media. Depending on the content, I will usually post it to
- The Facebook page corresponding to the site. Then, during the day, I ‘like’ and ‘share’ the post as myself. That as a limited reach, but if the Facebook post is public, it should benefit you.
- I use Twitshot to schedule tweets and spread them out over the day. (UPDATE -Jan 2020 – I am now using Buffer to schedule Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr posts)
- The post is added to a corresponding Pinterest board that I’ve created.
- The image is then sent to a corresponding Tumblr blog.
- I always share the post to Google +. I’ve read that helps get things indexed quickly.
- I use a couple of relevant hastags for Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
The nice thing with this approach is that it gives you a quick and dirty idea of how many images are indexed and how quickly they are getting indexes. This approach would probably work with Yahoo although I haven’t tried it recently.
Below is an example from another site showing recent additions to Google’s image index.Â
