Is there a way to prevent Google Alerts from picking up old press releases?
-
I have a client that wants a lot of old press releases (pdfs) added to their news page, but they don't want these to show up in Google Alerts. Is there a way for me to prevent this?
-
Thanks for the post Keri.
Yep, the OCR option would still make the image option for hiding "moo"
-
Harder, but certainly not impossible. I had Google Alerts come up on scanned PDF copies of newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s that were images.
The files recently moved and aren't showing up for the query, but I did see something else interesting. When I went to view one of the newsletters (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2S0WP3ixBdTVWg3RmFadF91ek0/edit?pli=1), it said "extracting text" for a few moments, then had a search box where I could search the document. On the fly, Google was doing OCR work and seemed decently accurate in the couple of tests I had done. There's a whole bunch of these newsletters at http://www.modelwarshipcombat.com/howto.shtml#hullbusters if you want to mess around with it at all.
-
Well that is how to exclude them from an alert that they setup, but I think they are talking about anyone who would setup an alert that might find the PDFs.
One other idea I had, that I think may help. If you setup the PDFs as images vs text then it would be harder for Google to "read" the PDFs and therefore not catalog them properly for the alert, but then this would have the same net effect of not having the PDFs in the index at all.
Danielle, my other question would be - why do they give a crap about Google Alerts specifically. There has been all kinds of issues with the service and if someone is really interested in finding out info on the company, there are other ways to monitor a website than Google Alerts. I used to use services that simply monitor a page (say the news release page) and lets me know when it is updated, this was often faster than Google Alerts and I would find stuff on a page before others who did only use Google Alerts. I think they are being kind of myopic about the whole approach and that blocking for Google Alerts may not help them as much as they think. Way more people simply search on Google vs using Alerts.
-
The easiest thing to do in this situation would be to add negative keywords or advanced operators to your google alert that prevent the new pages from triggering the alert. You can do this be adding advanced operators that exclude an exact match phrase, a file type, the clients domain or just a specific directory. If all the new pdf files will be in the same directory or share a common url structure you can exclude using the "inurl:-" operator.
-
That also presumes Google Alerts is anything near accurate. I've had it come up with things that have been on the web for years and for whatever reason, Google thinks they are new.
-
That was what I was thinking would have to be done... It's a little complicated on why they don't want them showing up in Alerts. They do want them showing up on the web, just not as an Alert. I'll let them know they can't have it both ways!
-
Robots.txt and exclude those files. Note that this takes them out of the web index in general so they will not show up in searches.
You need to ask your client why they are putting things on the web if they do not want them to be found. If they do not want them found, dont put them up on the web.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google ranking content for phrases that don't exist on-page
I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page. To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100. “Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content. Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms: “free rock music”
On-Page Optimization | | JCN-SBWD
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music” I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”. “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content? By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too. To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google! Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.0 -
How long does Google take to reduce the index size?
A few months ago, we have incorporated our custom search in our website www.ergodotisi.com . We hadn't been paying a lot of attention to our webmaster analytics, to find out a few months later than the Google Index had grown from 2K- 3K pages to one million because it was crawling all combinations of search filters. We have now followed the right instructions to add noindex meta tags and blocked most search result pages from the robot.txt. We allow indexing of some main categories by setting new seo-friendly url structures. A few weeks have passed and the index size has only reduced to 700K. How long does it take before it removes most of the duplicated search result pages from the index? Is it still crawling those pages but has not fully decided to remove most of them? How bad is this for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | cplastiras840 -
Why does Google not show my Meta Descriptions Sometimes ?
Hi Friends We have Meta Descriptions on our Pages but when certain keywords are typed into google search , different meta descriptions are created , for example when searching for "fancy dress" we see our meta description which is correct - Shop with Party Domain for all your Fancy Dress. 1000s of Fancy Dress Ideas at CHEAP Prices. Halloween Fancy Dress. Next Day Delivery and Same Day ... However when searching for "fancy dress costumes" the same page is ranked but the meta description is Fancy Dress. Female Pirate Fancy Dress Costume. £ 13.80. Female Pirate Fancy ... SKU: G11034. Pirate Captain Fancy Dress Costume. £ 12.22. RRP: £ 15.02 ... Thanks Adam
On-Page Optimization | | AMG1000 -
Google search: 'define:____'
See: http://screencast.com/t/oFSzIt5rRm Thrilled that Google is pulling our content over wikipedia (in this instance). Wondering how we can assure more success like this. Mike Corso
On-Page Optimization | | Mike_c
Gartner.com1 -
Ajax url returns an error by google. Is there another way besides creating a HTML version?
We trying to find out if there is anything to make it so google does not keep returning errors cuase of our ajax urls. Is there any other option besides creating it all in a HTML format for google to read? Any tips or help would be great!
On-Page Optimization | | DoRM0 -
Am I cannabalizing my title tags or is there a better way?
I've read some info about title tags and meta, and I'm getting a little confused. If there is a previous discussion that I've missed, please redirect me. thank you. So I have a locksmith and one of his pages is on Auto Locksmith. For every car, I have a page. i.e Acura, Audi, BMW etc. Here is my title tag: Acura Car Keys| Ignition Switch Repair| Key Duplication BMW Car Keys| Ignition Switch Repair| Key Duplication Same for the rest of the different car models on the site. I previously asked a question on here about "What is Cannibalization", and after reading the answer, as well as a full article about it, I think I may be potentially cannibalizing my site with these title tags, though my SEO Moz has not indicated that I am. Should my title tags be instead... Acura car keys| Acura Ignition Switch Repair| Acura Key Duplication for each vehicle page? Additionally, all the Meta Descriptions on each vehicle page read the same as well. Is this correct? We duplicate Acura car keys, repair ignition switches, extract broken keys, replace remotes, reprogram transponder keys and provide emergency locksmith srvc. Lastly, this is for a city, yet I have not placed the city modifier in my tags nor content. Somehow it knows what city I'm in because some of my pages are ranking on Page 1, however other pages are ranking like #188, #257...So I'm just confused. Thanks for any help you can provide. Jaye
On-Page Optimization | | jayestovall0 -
Possible Reasons for 40% Drop in Google since January?
Hello: I know this is long - but I kept it as succinct as I could to explain the situation - but everyone of the brilliant people on here insight is so greatly appreciated in advance. There has been more than a 30% decline in traffic mostly from Google on a site with an 11 year presence on the web, 5 page rank (historically 6), fairly good quality backlinks (but they are old). I cannot pinpoint a smoking gun (such as a specific penalty) - if it's just not attrition in demand for the product itself which there is plenty of evidence for. But I practice only white hat, so I don't know what it is. I do not engage right now in link building because my time to work on SEO is very limited. We have a few common keywords that cannot be avoided (because there are no good synonyms) so there is a high density for one word especially all over the site. From some websites (like tidbits) we have in Google Webmaster account tens of thousands of backlinks. How serious is this (FYI - they're not new though) Because of some unflattering reviews from sites with strong authority, the number of click throughs vs. impression in Google Search has dropped dramatically - I think a big part of it is that because the reviews drove down CT ratio. Interestingly, the number of CTs from Adwords has also dropped off significantly, and I was told by Adwords specialist that declining organic traffic does affect the Adwords traffic to - in fact, they're not even using our daily budget for Adwords as they used to. The site also doesn't pick up quality organic backlinks as it used to, and the anchor link text is almost always the same - a product name. Plus, the site was banned in 2008 by Google (from a black hat keyword stuffing that I discovered happened in another dept.) and only after really working hard was it reinstated by reconsideration request. Site traffic from Google has never fully reached it's potential since then. Also, text prices were removed from Buy Now buttons even though the prices were textually part of the buttons for years (could this be some penalty?) **Is it possible that Google is taking the ban history, the poor reviews, the decline in CTs to impressions on the site, the huge decline (75% over four years) in "search volume" or "search interest" (according to Google Trends) for the site's main product name and just using all of this to keep downgrading the site? If true, wouldn't the page rank be diving down to anywhere from 0 to 2 (or is that not relevant at all?) ** There are no messages of a penalty or anything else in the official Webmaster account for this site. Any insight anyone is able to provide is much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | holdtheonion1 -
Seo-friendly way to post blog content to homepage?
We have an e-commerce website. We would like to feature content from our blog on the site's homepage (both on same domain). The content we want to feature is latest posts titles (say 5) plus the few first lines from each post. We want search engines to be able to read this content. Is there a SEO friendly way to achieve this? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | gerardoH0