I'm trying to understand what Google is doing. I always setup Google Alerts for my websites. I do this for several reasons but not my purpose here to discuss that. When I post an article to the sites, I'll get a Google Alert for it usually within a couple of hours. However, when I look at webmaster tools I see the site has not been visited for say a week. Anyone know what is going on here? How Google knows a site has a new article yet it has not visited it. Thanks for the help (note to moderators, I am not sure where to post this. It mentions my sites but only to demonstrate what I'm trying to find out. What I'm trying to understand is Google's index so I think I have it in the write place.)
Google may have visited your site but you will not see the data in webmaster updated. Data in Google webmaster tools update after some time.
Your article get index in google and you get counter notification , this is because your site may be submitted in lots of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Social surf that's why your article gets indexed from there and your main page cache remains the same . This is the reason why your site is shown 'not visted' in the webmaster tool ! Regards, MB
Google Webmaster tools take a while to get updated, however you are getting the alert because your new article page was visited by the Google bot and got indexed and cached.
tTalmost as soon as I post. Webmaster tools are always a week or more out of date then! thinking.....The pages are in the index. The only way they could get there is if the site had been crawled.. Yea that makes sense I see the crawler on my site all the time but Webmaster Tools don't show that. That greatly reduces the value of webmaster tools unless I'm mistaken. Thanks all for the help.