Big Juice
02-05-2007, 08:44 PM
I am a big fan of Google Alerts as I find them to be quite useful for tracking many events and news items that interest me. The other day I received a Google Alert for a particular topic and I naturally trusted the link contained within the alert. Clicking on the link I was shocked to find that I was redirected not once but twice to a site that had nothing to do with the item in the alert. What made it even more worse was the cloaked page on the first redirect as it was a simple, keyword laden, page that had no real value. I couldn’t help but wonder how this page got by the good people at Google but clearly it did.
Being a curious fellow I wrote an email to Google asking them how this could have slipped by them. I have to admit that I was less than impressed by the response I got.
Thank you for your note. We're unable to answer to question unrelated to Google News. For further assistance with Google Alerts and for a quick way to contact the Google Alerts support team, please visit http://www.google.com/alerts/faq.html
Regards,
The Google Team
Maybe I am wrong here but, wouldn’t it be easier for them to transfer this email to the appropriate department (where they could see that it came from an internal source) rather than expect me to go out of my way to try to investigate how to get it to the right department?
If the Google Team isn’t going to address Spam issues within the Alerts then I may have to rethink the value of the Google Alerts as I already get enough spam in my email and organic search results.
Being a curious fellow I wrote an email to Google asking them how this could have slipped by them. I have to admit that I was less than impressed by the response I got.
Thank you for your note. We're unable to answer to question unrelated to Google News. For further assistance with Google Alerts and for a quick way to contact the Google Alerts support team, please visit http://www.google.com/alerts/faq.html
Regards,
The Google Team
Maybe I am wrong here but, wouldn’t it be easier for them to transfer this email to the appropriate department (where they could see that it came from an internal source) rather than expect me to go out of my way to try to investigate how to get it to the right department?
If the Google Team isn’t going to address Spam issues within the Alerts then I may have to rethink the value of the Google Alerts as I already get enough spam in my email and organic search results.