Auto Alerts When Your Website is Indexed
What does it mean to be indexed?
In a nutshell when you post your content online it is publicly available, however people will not be able to find it easily. When Google crawls your website it adds your site to it's index so that when people use the Google search engine your content will be shown. Until you are indexed by a search engine you are not going to show up in a search.
There are methods to having Google index your site faster, this article is not about that.
I am going to show you a method to check how well Google knows your site.
Manual Process
When I was getting started with blogging I would check how well Google knew me.
1. Open Web browser tab
2. Type site:input_your_domain_here.com
You can do this for any domain
When we search by site we answer the question "How well does Google know this domain?"
The more results that turn up the more often your content will be shown when someone searches for something that relates to your blog etc.
Well that is awesome. I will admit, it is pretty cool when your blog gets indexed because you immediately see a dramatic jump in daily visits. It's a nice feeling. (Thanks everyone!)
Automating without Search Console
A really cool feature with Google is the ability to set alerts. You can set alerts on anything. When new content you're interested occurs and really anything at all!
What if we create an alert for "site:you_domain.com"?
1. Navigate to google.com/alerts
2. Type what you want to alert on
3. Configure settings for how often you want to be alerted.
It really as easy as that!
Thanks for reading!
