Yet another quirk with Google Alerts

[oddsod]

Google Alerts has been messed up a bit recently. Previous discussion [webmasterworld.com] where the talk was about a sudden increase in the number of alerts being reported and the reporting of some really old stuff as if Google had lost part of their index and were re-indexing.

Today I find that a linkdomain: Alert has a new strange result. OK, OK Google's link: command has long been broken but I do find the linkdomain alert sometimes points me to a useful page. Today it suggested a news article on the BBC site was linking to me. Finding that incredible (particularly for this low value site of mine) I went to the BBC page. As expected, there was no link there. What I did find, however, suggests a reason why Google reported it.

My domain name is in the form of word1-word2.co.uk. word1 and word2 seem to occur independently on that BBC page and that seemed sufficient reason for Google to consider it a linkback to my site.

Crazy!

[tedster]

There's a very straightforward reason for this - Google does not support a linkdomain: operator. Only Yahoo and MSN do. So your alert is only asking for occurances of your domain as a keyword, not as a link.

See [google.com...]

[oddsod]

Duh! OK, thanks for that.

I did do a linkdomain search for webmasterworld.com before setting up that alert and the result suggested that the operator worked. I should have looked more closely.

[dstiles]

"domain name is in the form of word1-word2.co.uk"

Yes. That's what I found - I mentioned it in the other thread you referenced. Nor does the domain name need to include a hyphen.

I've only had two link alerts in the past two months, both last week. One was a keyword site - the type that claims every domain and word in the world is on their web site. The other was for alexa - another scam - telling me to go and check out traffic results - for someone else's site!

In both cases the results were combined words that made up my (and the other guy's) domain name. In both cases there was no useful - or even any - data.

Frankly, google alerts are a waste of time. If they can't get a simple thing like a domain name right how can they get anything else right? Please don't answer that, because I know they often don't.