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]

Working like a dog?

Is this expression based on how dogs are treated or on how hard they work?

I think it's more the former. If you are working like a dog, it's like being beaten into submission. "Working like a dog," as an expression, is akin to "it's a dog's life." Because otherwise, dogs don't work very hard, and most dogs lives are pretty darn good.

No matter that dog valorizers will surely disagree:

Some people have figured out that if you actually had to work only as hard as a dog, that might be a pretty good gig.

While others observe that no matter how "hard" they work physically, dogs are "on" or "available" 24/7.

Which is perhaps why we want to "let sleeping dogs lie." They might not work very hard but you don't want to interrupt them either; being grumpy is somehow related to working hard.

Most of us think bringing your dog to work would be great.

I would be in that camp, taking mine with me practically everywhere. While that's generally great, it's not without challenges; there are some things you can't or are reluctant to do and you have to always be thinking ahead about what to do with the dog. That said, I guess from an employer point of view I can see how it's a benefit to let employees bring their dogs to work; you are actually working "harder," with more focus, foresight, planning, etc. when you have your dog with you. And for sure you are more attentive to your colleagues and the general atmosphere in the workplace because people are always stopping by to pet the dog, and they say hello to you and smile. Having your dog at work makes you feel and act even more responsibly than you would otherwise.

Anyway, just for the record, I don't think dogs themselves work very hard, even on the availability scale. My Shih Tzu isn't terribly available. Like royalty, her idea of service is to some higher, public, universal purpose. Which in the workplace, seems to be just about the right attitude, for a dog.

Evidently, like other types of working folks, when times get lean, they can fall from grace, Shih Tzus reverting to their feral work ethic.