It’s funny how users interpret the behavior of software. I sometimes see complaints on Twitter that Google Alerts are way too slow.
I also see people who are amazed at how fast it is.
But it is the same software. Could the problem lie somewhere else? Here is a clue.
That’s right. Google Alerts are a measurement of when Google indexes a site. I know people think that Google is God, and that it knows about all pages the instant they are created, if not earlier. The reality is that some sites are indexed faster than others. The difference is based on the quality of the site’s SEO.
Instead of complaining about Google, which is about as useful as complaining about the weather, you should start improving the SEO of your site, and use the speed of Google’s response to tell you how well you are doing with that job.
All you have to do is setup a Google Alert for your site, and see how long it takes for new pages to be indexed. This is done with the search term:
site:yoururl.com
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My blog posts are normally up within a few hours – I don’t add new pages to my main site at all, although they do get updated.