Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
Does Google Understand H2 As Subtitle?
I use some HTML 5 tags on my custom template. I implement <header class="entry-header-outer"> Flavour & Chidinma – 40 Yrs 40 Yrs by Flavour & Chidinma </header> html code. h1 tag serves as the title, while h2 tag servers as the subtitle of the post. Take a look at it here: https://xclusiveloaded.com/flavour-chidinma-40-yrs/ I want to know if it's ok or should I remove the h2 tag. Guys, what is your thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Kingsmart4 -
Does RSS Feed help to rank better in Google?
Hello, I heard RSS Feed helps in ranking. However, I am not sure if I should enable RSS Feed or not. Whenever I publish an article on my site , I see that many other websites have leeched my Feed and get's the same article I written published with a nofollow backlink to my website article. The worst part is that my article doesn't appear in Google search, but the website which copied my article gets ranked in Google. Although the article gets index on google (checked by using site:website.com). Although some articles show up after 24 hours by ranking higher from the sites which copied my article. Any idea what should I do? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | hakhan2010 -
How to remove subdomains in a clean way?
Hello, I have a main domain example.com where I have my main content and then I created 3 subdomains one.example.com, two.example.com and three.example.com I think the low ranking of my subdomains is affecting the ranking of my main domain, the one I care the most. So, I decided to get rid of the subdomains. The thing is that only for one.example.com I could transfer the content to my main domain and create 301 redirects. For the other two subdomains I cannot integrate the content in my main domain as it doesn't make sense. Whats the cleanest way to make them dissapear? (just put a redirect to my main domain even if the content is not the same) or just change the robots to "noindex" and put a 404 page in the index of each subdomain. I want to use the way that will harm the least the performance with Google. Regards!
On-Page Optimization | | Gaolga0 -
Why is Google replacing my meta title with the business name on home page?
For all queries that return the home page, Google is not showing my meta title. Instead it replaced it with the official business name which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title. You can see this is you search on "mt view estate planning attorney". The site in question is dureelaw.com and the title showing is "The Law Office of Daniel L. DuRee." View the source and you'll see my meta title. Why is Google substituting it?
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse0 -
How does Google treat Dynamic Titles?
Let's say my website can be accessed in only 3 states Colorado, Arizona and Ohio. I want to display different information to each visitor based on where they are located. For this I would also like the title to change based on their location. Not quite sure how Google we treat the title and rank the site.... Any resources you can provide would be helpful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
How does Google Detect which keywords my website should show up for in the SE?
When I checked my Google Webmaster Tools I found that my website is showing up for keywords that I didn't optimize for ... for example I optimize my website for "funny pictures with captions", and the website is showing up for "funny images with captions". I know that this is good, but the keyword is dancing all around, sometimes I search for "funny pictures with captions" and I show up in the 7th page, and some time I don't show up. and the same goes for the other keyword. of course I am optimizing for more than two keywords but the results is not consistent. my question is how does Google decide which keywords you website should show up for? Is it the on-page keywords?, or is it the off-page anchor text keywords? Thank you in advance ...
On-Page Optimization | | FarrisFahad
FarrisFahad0 -
Does Google look at page design
Hi everybody, At the moment i'm creating several webshops and websites with the same layout, so visitors can recognize the websites are from the same company. But i was wondering: Does google look at the layout of a webpage that it's not a copy of another website? This because loads of website have the same wordpress/joomla templates etc, or doesn't this effect rankingpositions? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | iwebdevnl0