Google Alert Can Spy For You

Google does have some great services and among them is Google Alert.

All you have to do is to tell Google what keyword phrases you want to be alerted to and they will send the information to your in box – hence the name of the service – clever huh!

I have been amazed how quickly information gets picked up – I know because of the speed it returns my own blog and article entries.

And here is my tip of the day –

I have inadvertently stumbled upon another application for the service.

If you do publish a blog or articles, make sure that you add your own name as a keyword search phrase on ‘Google Alert’.  Not for  ego or vanity reasons. 

You can SPY on any abuse.

A few times recently I have found websites that on the surface look absolutely kosher – the articles along with titles all look relevant to the topic of the site – HOWEVER…   Closer inspection reveals all is not well.

There are what appear to be links on words such as ‘to’ and ‘this’

Now there is a chance that what I am going to link to here will have disappeared before you read this In fact I hope it will be as I have sent in a complaint to Google about the site.  The fact of the matter is that Google
are sending out search information for totally bogus sites – that won’t make Google happy.

See what I mean at – http://ucanreach.com/downloads/?p=93.  Now that is a genuine article by me and they have even left intact the author note and correct link at the bottom.  But see the links!!

If you look at the home page of the domain http://ucanreach.com/  you will see that the whole site is built from other peoples articles with the same link throughout the site.  Bizarre!!

The extraordinary thing about the links in this particular example is that a first inspection shows them as affiliate links, but click on them and you finish up on a perfectly legitimate PR website.  I don’t understand what is going on and would welcome any feedback if somebody understands the logic behind all that.

There really are some brainless idiots out there.

Another thing that you can also watch out for by using your name as a ‘Google Alert’ search is people using your articles on their website and not giving you the correct author bio reference and link at the end.

So do help to clean up the web by reporting this type of thing to Google and other search directories and sending the websites involved to the virtual trash can in the ether – where they belong.

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