James Siminoff

Gaming Google Alerts

Image via CrunchBase

The Google algorithm’s are supposed to be the best, so I was surprised to find something so simple has tripped it up.

Just to back up, I use 2 things to track companies/competitors on the web.  They are both do the same thing, Google Alerts and Tweetbeep.  I have lots of keywords in both services and when they show up on the we or twitter I immediately get an email.  If you have to track companies or competitors there is nothing better that I have found to get a true sense of the landscape then using these 2 services.

I have been noticing over the past few weeks that a keyword “Twitterfone” comes up every day, with the same post.  At first I just figured that the Google alerts had a glitch but today I went to the site that was creating the alert, which is some auto blog, you can see it at, http://blog.202km.com/, all they are doing is re-posting the blog every day.

Update- I should add that the main post is about Phweet (another service that does things with Twitter) and not about Twitterfone, Twitterfone is just mentioned in the post.  Therefore whoever is behind this is probably doing something with Phweet.

I am not sure what the point of this is as I doubt that it is helping them with SEO, the only thing that it seems to be doing is gumming up the google alerts.

This could be a useful (I will admit less than ethical) tactic to use in blocking your competition from following you too closely.  If you set up 10-20 sites like this that did this every day it would create too many alerts for your company and would probably cause your competitors to stop monitoring you.  The only problem with that is that a lot of partners and media also use google alerts, so that could really backfire.

Anyway, I was just surprised that it was so easy to mess up Google alerts, slow weekend…