Google Alerts

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!

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).