Comments on: 10 Uses of Google Alerts For A Freelancer

By: Adam Green

Adam Green — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:01:14 +0000

You are right on target in recommending that people use Google Alerts to track the SEO ratings of their competition, but how do you know who Google considers your competition? Here's a cool procedure I use: 1. Set up a Google Alert with related:[yoururl.com]. This will tell you whenever Google finds a site with the same keyword and link pattern as yours. 2. When this delivers a new site, start monitoring their inbound links with link:[competingurl.com] -site:[competingurl.com]. This will tell you when someone links to that competitor. 3. Contact the site that gave a link to your competitor and see if they'll link to your site as well. I've collected hundreds of similar tips in a free Google Alerts marketing tutorial: http://www.alertrank.com/google-alerts-marketing.html Feel free to send me your Google Alerts questions on Twitter. I'm @MrGoogleAlerts.

By: Saikat

Saikat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:49:32 +0000

Hi Yannick,
We have so many websites out there…it’s not possible to track them all. One way is through feeds and the second way is by using Google alerts. Set it up with keywords for the info you are searching for. For instance in my case it could be “freewares” or “free software”. I have got some pretty good sites through that which otherwise eI would have missed. Think of it as Google search on auto-pilot.

By: Yannick

Yannick — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:27:45 +0000

Awesome post, I was searching for how to show up, but I see I can make more from it by using it better.

It still leaves me a doubt, you say that google will find your content at some point in time, but on the other hand you say you use it to be ahead of competition by receiving “to the minute” news. How can you differentiate both.

Does it mean that even if I have news corresponding to my alert not showing yet, it’s possible they will show later ?

By: sayyad

sayyad — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:32:02 +0000

I am working photoshop

By: Saikat Basu

Saikat Basu — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 04:26:03 +0000

You can try the Google Video Search. Go to advanced search preferences and play around with it.And you can also set alerts for it. For instance, Adv Prefs allows you to search by domain. Maybe you can include the channel websites as a parameter. Often channel sites put up small ‘trailers’ as a program preview. The search can catch that. You can set an alert from the main page of video search or go to Adv Pref. Hope this helps.

By: magnoliasouth

magnoliasouth — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 23:05:27 +0000

Excellent post! I use it for my name to see what crops up, and also for current events that interest me. One thing I’m trying to work on, and haven’t come up with a successful solution yet, is to have it notify me of non-recurring TV shows (or classic films) that are coming on TV stations that I get.

For example. I love Columbo. Yep, I’m a geek! It used to routinely come on Bravo, and maybe it still does, but I now live in an area where our stinky cable doesn’t even get Bravo. I mean, who does NOT get Bravo?! Also, while Columbo was a so-called TV show, they’re all actually movies. Anyway, my frustration is that I can’t even favorite it as a show at places like TV Guide and Zap2it because it’s not technically a TV show.

My goal is to try and find a syntax that will search TV listings and let me know when the keyword “columbo” hits. There have been sites that have come and gone that searched for shows for you and emailed you when they found one, but the only ones I knew about have since died.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what others use it for.