Google Web Alerts

What's their use? Just for webmasters?

[robster124]

Anyone been using the new Google web alert (Beta) service? I haven't touched it yet but I presume it's going to be massively useful to us webmasters in keeping an eye on our rankings, backlinks and site indexing information.

[abates]

I set up one for a topic I'm interested in which I already have a news alert on, and the web alert gives me the same articles. i.e. I'll get a news alert for a news item on the topic, then I'll get a web alert a few hours later for the same news item. This has so far been the case 100% of the time...

[nakulgoyal]

I tried it. It's good for me.

[arrowman]

Tried it, but couldn't figure out what it was actually alerting me about.

[webwoman]

I have only received news items - no website alerts that had any value to me as a webmaster.

[your_store]

I presume it's going to be massively useful to us webmasters in keeping an eye on our rankings, backlinks and site indexing information.

I would not use Google alerts for the purpose of tracking rankings. Why on earth would you want Google to know which SERPs you're targetting?