Hi Stu,
I’ve never heard of that. What’s the alert text? Is it the domain name of your website or something like that?
Hi Caimin
Thanks for replying – the alert in the notification email has the following:
#################################################################
Google
[the alert term]
As it happens update May 8, 2014
WEB
[site domain]
#################################################################
and when you go into the Google alerts dashboard the related entry is:
############################################################
WEB 1 new result for [site domain]
http://[site domain]/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=locations_search
[site domain]
[site domain]/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action…
############################################################
Is that useful?
Thanks
Stuart
Actually, I meant the words / phrase you’re using to trigger the alert, rather than the email you get from Google.
Ah I see – its “rockliffe hall”
Is that mentioned in the URL of your site?
sort of – the URL is rockliffehall.com so yes but as you can see – without the space
That’s probably clear enough to trigger the alert, especially if there aren’t many other competing results for the term.
If there’s not a filter to have that url ignored in Google Alerts (not sure there is…) you could try disallowing it using a robots.txt file.
I dont think there is a filter that can be set at the content owners end (obviously alert consumers can decided what alerts they get) – I Google searched for ways to prevent content being selected by the Google Alerts but could not find anything – most people were trying to do the opposite.
The /wp-admin/ folder is already disallowed in the robots.txt but this is not stopping it being found.
Event Manager adds the URL in a JS script to the site pages surrounded by commented out CDATA tags. Would the old method of putting html comment tags around JS code (as discussed here: stackoverflow.com/questions/1507939/using-html-comment-tag-still-relevant-around-javascript-code) work?
This approach is no longer required for modern browsers but if we did this perhaps Google alerts would ignore the content – if it uses a different crawler which seems to have found this link within a script tag?
I don’t think that would make any difference.
I’m pretty sure that in Google Webmaster Tools there’s an option to remove / exclude specific URLs from the index. I’d say that’s definitely worth trying.
I had actually tried the URL Removal tool earlier but was waiting on the process to complete https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals
When I try to use the tool to remove the link again it says it has now been removed. So I will check to see if those Google alerts are still coming in with the person who reported them.
This may be the answer as on checking this Matt Cutts vid: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/remove-your-content-from-google.html it would seem that robots.txt may stop Google crawling a URL but doesnt necessarily stop the content showing up in Google a different way. However the removal tool is stronger than the htacess method and useful for removal rather than prevention.
Thanks for your help on this – I will update if this has in fact worked.
Person who raised this issues says they have not had these alerts in the last few days to the URL Removal tool may have worked.
Excellent – thanks for the update, it might help someone else.
Yeah hopefully – thanks for your help 🙂
