Netco newsletter November/December 2007

this issue:
Put your name on the map | Googling your competitors | Spam, Spam, Spam - stemming the flood | Netco search upgrade

 

Googling your competitors

How to spy on the competition

In only 8 or so years, Google came from nowhere to be the Internet search tool of choice.

It's big, comprehensive and has vast buildings full of geeks who spend their conscious hours devising more ways for their employer to become more irresistible and powerful.

Much of what motivates Google is money and staying popular and in those pursuits it's introduced many software programs that let you play with your web site to find out your own popularity and how to keep it high. Other Google programs let you keep tabs on your competitors.

Google alerts

Register your competitors' products, your own, your friends and even your own name and let Google send you an e-mail every time the words appear on a web page. Follow the antics of film stars and sports heroes but most of all, follow your own product names and trade marks and those of your competitors'.

www.google.com/alerts

Google search

Dig through the web to find out who links to your site and what they say about you. When you go to Google, enter this format for a search, substituting the name of your own site:

link:http://www.netco.co.nz/

Don't put a space between the "link:" and the beginning of the web page address or it won't work. If you make purple widgets and you want to know what you competitor has to say on the subject, use the format:

Purple widgets site:www.your-competitor.co.nz

Google will search only in the specified site. Should you wish to learn about purple widgets on .co.nz sites only, use the format:

Purple widgets site:.co.nz

Many sites use the HTML "Title" tags to give each page a title. It might be "about us", "Staff profiles" etc. To search page titles:

Intitle:purple widgets

Google will find pages with 'purple' in the title and 'widgets' somewhere in the body of the page. A slight twist on this is to use the format:

Inurl:purple widgets

This search looks for mention of 'purple' in the URL and 'widgets' in the page content. Remember, the URL is the fancy name for web address, the whatever.co.nz bit.

Google's advanced search page allows the refinement of searches. Look in the address bar of your browser after you hit enter and see how Google formats these searches. Then it's easy to learn how to bang out fast, refined searches instead of grab-alls that bury your target 590 screens deep amongst a load of irrelevant dross.

My own name's a good example. Spavin is a horse disease with several variants: bone, blood and bog, describing arthritis, varicose veins and haematomas in horses' legs! There's a dog show judge with the same surname in England who has her name mentioned at seemingly every dog show in Europe. If I Google my surname, I find hundreds of these irrelevant entries. Using Google's advanced search, I can cut out dogs, vets and horses. A search on Spavin without the ponies or pooches cluttering the place up would look like this: spavin -horse -dog -vet -veterinarian -cure -blood -bog -bone

Hunt out your own name or product (or your competitors') by going to Google's advanced search and using the search box's inclusion and exclusion fields. Then refine your searches until extraneous hits are filtered out.

Searching on Spavin using exclusions returns 30,100 hits, searching on Spavin alone returns double that and they're probably all about horse disease or dog shows. Work on it more and you'll soon have an exact search you can run monthly to check your own information and snoop on your competitors'.

this issue:
Put your name on the map | Googling your competitors | Spam, Spam, Spam - stemming the flood | Netco search upgrade