Is there a way to prevent Google Alerts from picking up old press releases?
-
I have a client that wants a lot of old press releases (pdfs) added to their news page, but they don't want these to show up in Google Alerts. Is there a way for me to prevent this?
-
Thanks for the post Keri.
Yep, the OCR option would still make the image option for hiding "moo"
-
Harder, but certainly not impossible. I had Google Alerts come up on scanned PDF copies of newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s that were images.
The files recently moved and aren't showing up for the query, but I did see something else interesting. When I went to view one of the newsletters (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2S0WP3ixBdTVWg3RmFadF91ek0/edit?pli=1), it said "extracting text" for a few moments, then had a search box where I could search the document. On the fly, Google was doing OCR work and seemed decently accurate in the couple of tests I had done. There's a whole bunch of these newsletters at http://www.modelwarshipcombat.com/howto.shtml#hullbusters if you want to mess around with it at all.
-
Well that is how to exclude them from an alert that they setup, but I think they are talking about anyone who would setup an alert that might find the PDFs.
One other idea I had, that I think may help. If you setup the PDFs as images vs text then it would be harder for Google to "read" the PDFs and therefore not catalog them properly for the alert, but then this would have the same net effect of not having the PDFs in the index at all.
Danielle, my other question would be - why do they give a crap about Google Alerts specifically. There has been all kinds of issues with the service and if someone is really interested in finding out info on the company, there are other ways to monitor a website than Google Alerts. I used to use services that simply monitor a page (say the news release page) and lets me know when it is updated, this was often faster than Google Alerts and I would find stuff on a page before others who did only use Google Alerts. I think they are being kind of myopic about the whole approach and that blocking for Google Alerts may not help them as much as they think. Way more people simply search on Google vs using Alerts.
-
The easiest thing to do in this situation would be to add negative keywords or advanced operators to your google alert that prevent the new pages from triggering the alert. You can do this be adding advanced operators that exclude an exact match phrase, a file type, the clients domain or just a specific directory. If all the new pdf files will be in the same directory or share a common url structure you can exclude using the "inurl:-" operator.
-
That also presumes Google Alerts is anything near accurate. I've had it come up with things that have been on the web for years and for whatever reason, Google thinks they are new.
-
That was what I was thinking would have to be done... It's a little complicated on why they don't want them showing up in Alerts. They do want them showing up on the web, just not as an Alert. I'll let them know they can't have it both ways!
-
Robots.txt and exclude those files. Note that this takes them out of the web index in general so they will not show up in searches.
You need to ask your client why they are putting things on the web if they do not want them to be found. If they do not want them found, dont put them up on the web.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Mobile usability issues
Hi,
On-Page Optimization | | MProenca
I received a mail from Google to "Fix mobile usability issues found on http://miguel-proença.com/ ". I've changed to a responsive design and all site pages are now mobile-friendly. However, on webmaster tools the usability issues still appear. Does anybody have a solution to this ? Thanks0 -
Creative ways to dramatically increase content on ecommerce category pages?
I need to signficantly boost the content on the category pages on my ecommerce website. Currently, they're pretty thin, with some only having approx 50 words of unique content. In the past, I've intentionally kept the content on these pages quite light, to keep the aesthetic a certain way. It's a fashion-based site, so it's very much about the visual. However, with the introduction of Panda, I need to change this mindset. But, there must be slightly more creative ways to boost the content to stop the pages looking too text heavy. I'm not talking hidden text or anything, but ways to break it up in different blocks on the page to make it look natural/relevant, while keeping it looking great. Anyone have any good ideas? Or, any links to ecommerce sites that have employed brilliant methods?
On-Page Optimization | | Coraltoes770 -
Blogposts and Google Rankings
I'm pretty new to all of this, my new website is starting to come along nicely in the SERPs, now appear on page 4 for my main key phrases were I didn't appear last week at all. I'm now on a mission to get myself ranked higher but my website is pretty much done... apart from the ongoing blogposts that I need to add, I'm a wedding photographer so every shoot is going on to it. My question, my blogposts aren't necessarily targeting my main key phrase, it might be mentioned once or twice but ultimately it'll most likely be the venue that steals the targeting. By adding the blogposts (I still have 36 to do) and using my keyphrase sparing, will this help to elevate me from page 4 in google? I know that I still need to build backlinks etc to but just something I can't seem to find an answer for on google hehe.
On-Page Optimization | | MartinWardPhoto0 -
90 days for Google
Hi, I'm new to Moz so still getting a feel of the forums. If my question has been answered then please point me in the right direction. I have noticed with many SEO companies they advertise that they can get you on google front page in 90 days. I'm not really interested in their techniques but more of why google takes 90+ to even appear. I have been working on my site for over a month, adding content, building good links, social media, blogs etc... but have not even come close to appearing in the top 50 pages for google. Is this normal? Is it just a matter of time before it starts to appear? Also, I have checked my backlinks and there is about 8 links that are coming from random pages in the US and some from China and india which i have no idea of. I tried to visit on of the sites but it had malware. I added all these back links to google disavow so hopefully that will fix it. Could that be the reason google would not even list my site? Thanks... Rick
On-Page Optimization | | pureozone0 -
Only homepage in Google
Hello SEOmozzers, A colleague of mine started up a site here: www.wikiboedel.nl. Sadly only the homepage is indexed in Google. It's a wordpress install. Robots.txt seems fine, all pages are on index and follow. Can't see why only the home is indexed in Google. Do you know whats going wrong? Please tell me. Tank you.
On-Page Optimization | | B.Great0 -
Best way to do a 301 redirect when the incorrect page has rank and FB likes
Due to a site structural problem with our CMS we have alot of duplicate content pages (1 page, with multiple urls). We are in the process of setting up 301 redirects to correct the problem. Meanwhile; one of the pages with the "incorrect" URL happens to be the page google favors and also has about 100 FB "likes". The question is: Are we better off keeping the "incorrect" URL for that particular page and redirect the other url to it? Both have a page rank of 3. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | foodsleuth0 -
Google Ranking Dropped
Hi We launched a new website on the12th Feb 2012, it appeared on google page one for the search term "compare travel insurance" . Last week it changed ranking to page 49 of google ranking. my site is www.1234compare1234travel1234insurance1234ireland1234.com Take out the 1234 for my site address, some people have mentioned that it was honeymooned to page 1 due to being a new site with new content. Can anyone tell me if it looks as if I've done something wrong and been penalised by google? If not are there any SEO advice I could use to improve ranking? All comments and advice appreciated. Regards Paul
On-Page Optimization | | CocoMagenta1 -
Does Google respect User-agent rules in robots.txt?
We want to use an inline linking tool (LinkSmart) to cross link between a few key content types on our online news site. LinkSmart uses a bot to establish the linking. The issue: There are millions of pages on our site that we don't want LinkSmart to spider and process for cross linking. LinkSmart suggested setting a noindex tag on the pages we don't want them to process, and that we target the rule to their specific user agent. I have concerns. We don't want to inadvertently block search engine access to those millions of pages. I've seen googlebot ignore nofollow rules set at the page level. Does it ever arbitrarily obey rules that it's been directed to ignore? Can you quantify the level of risk in setting user-agent-specific nofollow tags on pages we want search engines to crawl, but that we want LinkSmart to ignore?
On-Page Optimization | | lzhao0