Getting your blog noticed by Google Alerts

Having published a couple of posts about the Obama family's hopes of getting a dog, I subscribed to a Google Alert for "Obama dog" so I could follow the news. I expected that my own posts would appear in the Alerts but to date nada.

So I surfed around a little bit and found a number of bloggers talking about the same problem: how to get your blog posts noticed by Google Alerts.

Haley Lovett at All the Write Blogs compares Google Alerts to Pony Express.

Kathie Thomas at Soho Life notes that Google Alerts would be a useful tool to track mentions of their blogs or websites on other sites, if it worked better.

Anne Helmond at The Blog Herald thinks it's because the blogosphere is expanding too fast for the crawlers to keep up. She has a point. A Google Blog Search of "obama dog" comes up with 160,943 URLs.

If my posts are in that 160,000+, they're going to be totally buried. But if I search "obama dog" and my site's name "greatcitydogs.com", much to my relief there's one of my posts. But not the other post. Looking at the second one carefully I see that it doesn't actually have the word "Obama" in it. "Obamas" and "Obama's" yes, but "Obama", no.

So the question here isn't probably whether or not your blog is getting searched, but how your blog ranks, which is question as old as search engines, and whether your Alert search terms match the keywords in your blog post.

About blog ranking, we know that search engine algorithms place a lot of importance on links in to your site, i.e., not the links you make out to others, but when other people link to you. If other people think your site is important enough to link to, that's good enough for Google. But if no one, or very few people link to your blog, then your site or blog page or blog post is not going to rank very high and it's probably not hitting Google's threshold of alert-worthiness. Certainly there are thousands of posts now using the words "Obama" and "dog", hundreds of new ones being written every day. Google Alerts sends only three or five items in any daily alert, most likely the highest ranked/best linked.

What can you do about search engine ranking? Not very much. Building a link network means building a readership, which is challenging work for everyone who isn't already famous or otherwise hooked in, but Nick at Click for Nick has some useful ideas about how to use Google Alerts to help you build your network.

Also, in the btw department, Justin Smith at Searching Solutions doesn't address this question but has helpfully thought a lot about how else to get the most out of Google Alerts.

img src: I'm not sure whose image that is above, looks somewhat like a William Wegman Weimaraner, but I found it, through Google, here on Bruno Garschagen's blog.
[More about the Weimaraner by Sandy Moyer at Bella Online]