On a new Blog I kicked off only a couple of weeks ago, I have had a similar "issue" with alerts on normal topical keywords. The blogs postings are still not showing in alert searches, despite knowing that those keywords are in the title, and yes the posting is indexed. Other blogs with postings on similar topics, but not from this blog.

However, another of my alerts, keying on the blog's name (which is a suffix on the titles), shows all postings, pages, and category pages as stuff is created and enter the index.

It does seem like there are other factors that enter into whether a posting shows up at all on random keywords.
It is not links, I believe, from what I have seen.

Since readers are coming in based on keywords from normal Google searches, it seems to be an Alert thing only, if it even is a real issue. Not an across all search issue.

Thanks for the helpful thoughts, Dee Cee.

Anybody else have any suggested best practices for making sure blog posts make their way to Google Alerts?

Any silver bullets?

Tedster, is this something you know something about maybe?

I think I have an idea whats really on here.

When you configure an alert you can chose "best matches" or "all matches". But since Google never sends anyone an email with 2 Mill matches, reality is a little different. They send you a set of say 25-30 main reprentative matches, which in reality are 25-30 "groups" of matches. Grouped into related "stories" based on what else appear in their titles/content.

A small link with "See all stories on this topic", which is located under each "match" you see in the alert email.

This means that to see "everything" and maybe find your clients postings, you have to look at not only each "matching" entry in the email, but will have to click through and see the larger list in each group. (Some times that links actually leads to an empty page, meaning that it was alone on that topic.

So if they do not see their postings, it could be because the same overall topic (with their search keyword a part of it) is represented by many postings during a day, and theirs simply was not chosen as the most representative for a group, shown directly in the email.

Or, are they really clicking through on all the "See all stories" links to check whether their stuff is merely found further down in the match tree?

That's a good point. My guess is that they are not clicking through to see all stories, just looking at the top ones that Google brings to their attention. However, I think this is happening even with the company name, which is not completely unique but should be unique enough that their results would make the top set. Thanks again for the help.