Because I like to monitor my name, Bill Hartzer, to make sure I’m kept up to date on all of my new “mentions” on the web, several years ago I set up Google Alerts and Yahoo! Alerts for my name. If there is a new mention of my name, then I’m supposed to get an alert via email. It’s a pretty cool service: when it works.
The past couple of days I have been getting Yahoo! Alerts on my name all of a sudden, and I know that it’s not because I suddenly became more popular online. In fact, it’s been years since I set up this Yahoo! Alert on my name and for at least two years I have never received any alerts. So I figured it just wasn’t working. But all of a sudden there are new alerts. Okay, well maybe they got it working again? Who knows?
But today, I get this alert from Yahoo!:
Hello!?!?
Really?
There is a Yahoo! alert for MY NAME, Bill Hartzer, and all of the pages are related to Europe. I was curious, so I actually went to the Europe wikipedia page to see if I got a link or a mention on the Europe wikipedia page. Nope! By the way, it really isn’t that far fetched: I could actually have gotten a link because of my blogging. After all, I have a link from the Twitter wikipedia page. Just goes to show that if you write good content, you will get natural links from great sites linking to your site or blog post.
So, back to Yahoo! Alerts. This is really kind of weird, though: that Yahoo! for some reason would associate my name with the keyword “Europe” for some reason. And, not only that, they’re associating my name with other Europe-related web pages.
I am I missing something here?
Why would I possibly receive a Yahoo! Alert via email from their service–associating me with Europe?