Do you monitor the incoming links in your dashboard? Have they been confusing you or making you a bit frustrated lately?
How about I tell you what’s happening and provide a few possible solutions.
About Incoming Links
Inside your dashboard you have an Incoming Links Widget that shows all the blogs that are linking to your blog.
Experienced bloggers rely heavily on these incoming links to find people who are citing their blog or name. The idea is you follow the link, see what’s be written and why, and choose if you want to engage in a conversation (by leaving a comment or writing a post). This is important for building relationships, conversations and your blog community.
Unfortunately the incoming links widget in our dashboard uses Google Blog Search and at the moment Google Blog Search is broken. Normally Google Blog Search indexes blog posts that link to your post or blog however it is now indexing all blogs that include links to your blog in its sidebar.
This means when ever a person writes a post and your blog is included as a link in their sidebar (e.g. their blog roll, recent comments) you will receive a new link in your incoming links widget. If they write 3 posts that day, without even citing your blog in their post, you will receive a new link. While it might be nice; it’s not helpful.
Hopefully this issue with Google Blog Search will be resolved soon but in the meantime here is one option.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an automatic notification system that advise you by email or RSS when it finds new items on web pages that match your search criteria.
Bloggers frequently use it to find people who cite their name or blog. The benefit of Google Alerts is it picks up all those posts where the bloggers have forgotten to include the link and only used your blog/name.
How to set up a Google Alert
- Go to Google
- Click on More and then select Even More
- Click on Alerts
- Enter the Search term, choose whether to receive notification by email or RSS and then click Create Alert
Here is what an email from Google Alerts looks like:
FINAL THOUGHTS
As a blogger it’s a good idea to use Google Alerts for picking up those posts where people mention your name or blog but forgot to link. My next post will provide another option for monitoring incoming links.
Are you currently using Google Alerts? And what do you use it for?
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