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: 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. 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
-
Sitelinks Not Appearing
We've have been ranking number 1 for all brand related terms but yet still sitelinks won't appear. We have submitted an xml sitemap We have a front facing sitemap in the footer We have a clear hierarchy of pages on the site We have a strong link profile We have a few hundred visits a month from organic search We are running Google Shopping ads Is there anything else that I should be doing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Rankings Tanked since new Site redesign land new url Structure ? Anything Glaringly Obvious I need to check ?
Hi All, I've just checked my rankings and everything on my eCommerce Site has pretty much tanked really badly since my new URL structure and site redesign was put in a place 2 weeks ago. My url structure was originally long and had underscores but we have now made it clean, shorter and use hyphens. We also have location specific pages and we have incorporated these into the new url structure.Basically it now pretty much follows the breadcrumb trail on our website. We were originally a general online hire site but now we have become niche and only concentrating on one types of products, so we got rid of all the other categories/products and pages we do not deal with anymore. Our Rankings issue , was only bought to light in the most recent MOZ Ranking report so it's looking site google hates our new store. Someone mentioned the other day, that Google may have been doing a Panda/Penguin refresh last weekend, but I am surprised to have dropped like 20 to 50 places for most of my keywords. We have set up the 301 redirects, We have also made the site alot smaller and set up a few thousand 404's to get rid of a lot of redundant pages . We have cut down massively on the thin/duplicate content and have lots of good new content on there. We did new sitemaps , set up schema.org. , increase text to code ratio . Setup our H1-H5 tags on all our pages. made site mobile responsive.. Basically , we are trying to do everything right. Is there anything glaringly obvious , I should be checking ?. I attach a Short url link if anyone wants to have a quick glance- http://goo.gl/7mmEx i.e Could it be a problem with the new urls or anything else that I should be looking at ?.. I.e how can I check to make sure the link juice is being passed on to the new url ? Or is all this expected when doing such changes ? Any advice greatly appreciated .. Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Google and JavaScript
Hey there! Recent announcements at Google to encourage webmasters to let Google crawl Java Script http://www.googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/understanding-web-pages-better.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/05/rendering-pages-with-fetch-as-google.html We have always put JS and CSS behind robots.txt, but now considering taking them out of robots. Any opinions on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
How to get a site out of Google's Sandbox
Hi I am working on a website that is ranking well in bing for the domain name / exact url search but appears no where in Google or Yahoo. I have done the site search in Google and it is indexed so I am presuming it is in the sandbox. The website was originally developed in India and I do not know whether it had some history of bad backlinks. The website itself is well optimised and I have checked all pages in Moz - getting a grade A. Webmaster Tools is not showing any manual actions - I was wondering what I could do next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AllieMc0 -
Is Google taking longer to rank new sites?
We run a lot of "niche blogs" and websites focused on fairly non-competitive keywords. At the start of the year, we used to be able to put up websites and be able to achieve almost instant rankings on these sites. However, recently, it seems to be taking a lot longer for these sites to rank. It also seems to be taking longer for Google to index links. Is this a recent change in Google to protect against spam and help filter out the lower quality sites? Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840 -
Links on Google Notebook
I have used OSE to look at links of a competitors site and notice they have dozens for links from Google Notebook pages eg http://www.google.pl/notebook/public/05275990022886032509/BDQExDQoQs8r3ls4j This page has a PA of 48 Is this a legitimate linking strategy?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Google Places / Google Analytics
I apologize first if this comes across as extremely novice, but I realized I really didn't know the answer and so - here I am. 🙂 Is anyone familiar with tracking google place traffic in google analytics? Is it possible? I'd love to know how many of our visitors are coming from our google place listings (we have several locations throughout the state.) Much gratitude in advance ~ Alicia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aaronetics0