Just curious if anyone has experienced the same - but I've got a number of alerts set up to watch an exampledomain dot com (even w/ a few various formats: http : / /www dot domain dot com and www dot domain dot com), and I haven't noticed any alerts in a while, even though I know of a few new links. I'm trying to figure out if the alerts are failing, or if Google is taking longer to index some of these site? Is there an easy way to see if Google has indexed a new link on another site? Thanks in advance!
The only accurate way is to view through Google Webmaster Tools with owner account. The easiest way is Google Alerts as you already know. However, it is not reliable enough in my opinion. It just display when the tracking domain has been referred by some website but it does not mean that link or page would be counted from Google perspective. Another way you might consider some 3rd party metric to help your measure overall link popularity and pattern such as SEOMOZ Linkscape or SEOMOZ Trifecta.
I use google alerts too, and what i can say is google alert not send the email to you immediately when the post indexed. They have some time period to "collect" the link, then only send to you. I believed that this is because google alert dont want to send you tons of email per day, and therefore they combine the post and send only either reach certain amount of link or the time period set by them
Thanks for the feedback! Good call on WM Tools - forgot about that, went and checked and starting to see a few, but not all. I"m guessing Google crawls pages frequently, and finds links quickly, but doesn't necessarily index those as quick as we might think. Perhaps Google is starting to want to see links that stay longer and don't just come and go? Will continue to observe and learn. lifeplayer: u can set up alerts to notify you immediately, but I think the default is daily. -Cheers.
Google Alerts monitor search phrases and thus if a link to your website has anchor text that you'll get the alert if you monitor 'Anchor Text' and not the URL.
Praet is right. Your linking pages would only be picked up in Google alerts as you set it up if you use your domain name as your anchor text