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.
What makes a site appear in Google Alerts? And does it mean anything?
-
Hi All,
I recently started using Google Alerts more and more and while sites I support never appear there (not surprising) I recently noticed few very poor and low quality sites that do.
This site for example appears quite a bit in its niche.
So to my questions...
What makes a site appear in Google Alerts? And does it mean anything?
Thanks
-
Great article though MOZ for example does not appear in "news" search which seems weird. Does it mean it won't come up in alerts for terms like "SEO"...?
Also, do you think I should ask for inclusion in the news? Does it help with SEO?
-
Thanks Andy-Halliday but this is not what I meant (though it is a good implementation which I practice also).
I wondered why some sites articles get noted and others don't. gazzerman1's response seems right and the article he referred stated that you might ask for inclusion (MOZ for example does not appear in the news and therefore may not appear in "search term" alerts though I doubt it).
Anyhow, this also led to my next question if it means anything if it is good to ask to be included in the news:Â http://moz.com/community/q/does-including-your-site-in-google-news-and-google-alerts-helps-with-seo
Thanks
-
As others have said, alerts will come to you based on the search terms and frequency you have told Google - you can change these if the results emailed to you aren't what you are looking for.
In terms of what it means, all it means is that the web pages have matched the terms you asked for. Â It doesn't mean the pages are of any set quality or ranking.
Alerts are great for tracking mentions of your brand and those of competitors.
-
I probably have to go with the Ady’s idea on Google Alters! This is exactly how I think Google Alters works!!
-
Just to correct a little something on here, you don't need to have anything in Google news or be in the top 10 for anything.
Google Alerts will trigger based on your keywords / phrase and then mail you based on your criteria as they are discovered. I have a lot of these set "as they happen" and are all related to brand mentions / articles of interest.
-Andy
-
I have a google alerts for 'brand name' and set it to email every time the 'brand name' appears on the web.
Its then when Google finds a new mention of my 'brand name' anywhere on the web it triggers an alert to me.
It doesn't send me historical mentions on the brand, but it does send me an email every time the brand is mentioned. I sometimes get really old articles but it just means Google have just found the article.
If its on the bigger, more popular sites I can get alerts within minutes / hours of the article going live, sometimes its a few weeks later and the longest I've had is a few years.
So the alerts are triggered every time Google find a new mention of the 'search term' you have requested. They don't send historical mentions about the brand.
-
Basically you need to be in Google News and then the article thats in the news must reach the top 10 in Search Results
Looks like this should cover all your questions
http://homebusiness.about.com/od/yourbusinesswebsite/a/google-alerts.htm
I actually learnt something myself as well on there, thanks for making me refresh my memory
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
-
How can I make sure Google is crawling a link from an iframe (video)?
Do they crawl backlinks from an iframe example from a Youtube video embedded in a blog post? TIA!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zpm20140 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk  (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr  (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it  for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown  first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
Proper 301 in Place but Old Site Still Indexed In Google
So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
How can I get a list of every url of a site in Google's index?
I work on a site that has almost 20,000 urls in its site map. Google WMT claims 28,000 indexed and a search on Google shows 33,000. I'd like to find what the difference is. Is there a way to get an excel sheet with every url Google has indexed for a site? Thanks... Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Number of images on Google?
Hello here, In the past I was able to find out pretty easily how many images from my website are indexed by Google and inside the Google image search index. But as today looks like Google is not giving you any numbers, it just lists the indexed images. I use the advanced image search, by defining my domain name for the "site or domain" field: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search and then Google returns all the images coming from my website. Is there any way to know the actual number of images indexed? Any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau1 -
So What On My Site Is Breaking The Google Guidelines?
I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles" I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed) Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response... So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed. I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons. They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links. Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't) Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk UPDATE: Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed. They stated it was a manual penalty. I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules. It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty. Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor0 -
Is it possible to Spoof Analytics to give false Unique Visitor Data for Site A to Site B
Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
How to make SEF URL for PHP/MySQL web site
Hi mozzers! I'm fairly new to SEO topic, but I'm learning fast because all of you, so please take my warm thanks first! The problem: I have a web site based on PHP/MySQL that has no SEF addresses, it's made by unknown CMS, so I cannot use any extensions or modules, I have to write my own SEF extension. The question: Would you suggest me, please an article or idea, what I need to make my URLs search engine friendly? What's best to use: .htaccess or something else? This is the aforementioned web site: www.nortrak.bg Thanks a lot, Kolio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kolio_kolev0
