An author told me last week she had a Google Alert set for her own name, which made me wonder if she would get an alert about some thread here that mentions her name. So I set a Google Alert for her name, then came here and posted her name in this ATMB thread.
I didn’t get an alert, and I thought maybe the Alert wasn’t in effect yet. So when I started getting alerts (some from other discussion boards), I came back and posted her name again. No Alert.
My last test was to post her name in a thread title here, just in case the Alert would pick up words in a title but not in the body of a thread. No luck.
It would seem to me that if TPTB want to raise the awareness and value of this site, that it would be a good thing if Google alerted the world when we discussed matters of interest to outside folks.
Though it may be that you folks are deliberately shielding the site from th the Alert function, I wouldn’t know. Anyway, just reporting the results of my experiment.
I do believe that it has been used before here, and it often led to authors popping in and talking about their book, and then disappearing. I could understand this being undesirable.
That said, are you sure you waited long enough for Google to index the page? If you do a regular search, and restrict it to the past few hours, can you find the page?
Google Search works for SDMB – I use that in preference to th built in search function. The Alert function is supposed to email me whenever words that I specify appear on the Web, but I didn’t get any alerts for what I posted here.
Why would an author appearing to talk about their book and then going away be a bad thing? Especially if their book was mentioned here, and a search or an alert broght them here.
I can see Aprilynne Pike now, researching her new novel and discovering that her inbox is filled to the brim with Alerts. Don’t be surprised if her newest villian / redshirt is named “Jim”…
AFAICT, no Google Alert blocking measures have been taken by the admins, nor have we discussed doing so. I’m not sure why, but it appears that Google only indexes the SDMB in terms of thread titles. (Searching for Gukumatz in Google only nets me the title of the thread where my mod ascendancy was announced.) Since Google hasn’t released any technical documents about the feature, at least as far as I can find, I don’t really know what we can do about it.