Get RSS Feeds For Your Google Alerts

The free google alerts tool is a great way to monitor various aspects of your (or your competitor) websites, news, search results, etc. I’ve got a few setup to monitor new inbound links and for blog posts covering topics I’m interested in. It’s a good way to spot news items and ideas for your blogs. For instance, I’ve got an alert setup to check for references to the popular hill walking destination at Moel Famau (my blog). When someone (typically hill walkers and fell runners) blogs about Moel Famau or it gets mentioned in news items I’m alerted to it and can then choose to publish a blog post for my site as a result. Content is king and all that !

The alerts management system isn’t great because as far as I’m aware you cannot modify the email address to which the alert is sent to. By default they are emailed to the address used in your google account but when you create a new alert you get the chance to specify an email address. I’ve no idea though how you modify the email address on existing alerts.

That’s not a problem now though if you prefer to receive your alerts via an RSS feed! A new option within alerts allows you to create an RSS feed for each alert and automatically subscribe to it in google reader. When you create an alert it’s automatically added to your list of feeds in google reader. Only thing I immediately notice is that you’ll need to rename the subscription to something a little shorter and more meaningful. 

I’ll be editing and creating RSS feeds for all my alerts from now on.

What do you use google alerts for?

Source.