Google Alerts

[Westech]

I just stumbled across www.google.com/alerts . This is a very cool service that will send you an email notification when new pages are indexed by Google that contain your specified terms.

There are a lot of potential ways for webmasters to use this. A couple of the search terms that I have set up as alerts are:

site:mysite.com
To alert me when new pages of my site are indexed.

mysite.com -site:mysite.com
To alert me when other sites mention or link to my site.

Be sure you remember to set the type to "Web" when creating your alerts. Have fun!

[Chris]

One of my writers did this with their name and it alerts her to when people copy her writing without permission but leave the byline intact.

[Giles]

I have one for my name, and also for pages of my site.

[KLB]

I've subscribed to Google Alerts service for around a year I'd guess. I've found it very useful as another tool to find copyright violations and seeing what others are saying about my site.

[fatnewt]

I've been using this for a while too, mostly to check for press coverage at work.

[HAWK]

Should you be using site:yoursite or site: yoursite?
The space seems to be making a difference...

[FPU]

Google Alerts is cool, great idea Westech, I never though of using it for that!

There was a Google Alerts before the official Google Alerts if you all remember!

[Westech]

Hawk, I'm using site:mysite.com (no space) and it seems to be working correctly.

Another thing to note is that when using site: in google searches, it puts a wildcard to the left of your search term, so for example:

site:.gov would restrict search results to any .gov site.
site:mysite.com would include mysite.com, www.mysite.com, and subdomain.mysite.com.
site:www.mysite.com would include www.mysite.com, but leave out any URLS with only mysite.com (no www).