Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is rolling out significant updates across the board this week. The lastest update is to its popular Google Alertsservice. Now, Google has added blogs to its Alerts notifications. This is following the announcement of placing blog search results in Google News.

Why is this significant? In our experience talking with organizations about online reputation management, they often respond saying they monitor online conversations using Google Alerts. The previous version of Google Alerts failed in capturing the online conversation due to the lack of blog tracking. Now when anyone signs up for Google Alerts they will have the option of tracking blogs in addition to Google News, groups and the web. Even better, the default is set to the Comprehensive Alert to track all, giving communications professionals the ability to track a deeper thread in the online conversation.

My issue with Google Alerts is that its still an email-based deliver system. Why not put an RSS feed directly on the Google Alerts sign up page?

As Google is rolling out advanced features in many areas of its business, we can only assume there will be a RSS tie in with Google Reader.

Our biggest concern from a usability standpoint is blog spam. We’ll be testing this out to see if the quality of the results from blog posts are good or not. There are companies out there like Collective Intellect and Umbria that have entire systems to track the blogosphere and in our opinion their greatest value is eliminating blog spam. Try doing a Technorati search on a specific topic, 90% of the results are irrelevant, maybe popular, but irrelevant. Google Alerts is no way a substitute for a brand monitoring systems like Collective Intellect and Umbria, but it is a first step into understanding the impact.

So it’s still up to the Communications Analysts to take the data from search that is relevant, the data from blogs that are popular and craft a strategy to identify and converse with the influencers.

Note to PR Firms: Google Alerts just upped itself a notch to becoming your clipping service – and it’s Free.

Others in the Google Alerts conversation:
TechCrunch
Google Blog

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