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Alerts & thresholds

Alert

Also known as: Benachrichtigung

An alert is an automatic notification that fires when a monitored value meets a condition set in advance. In SEO monitoring, alerts report things such as a page no longer being reachable or a change to the robots.txt.

How do alerts work?

A monitoring system checks data at set intervals and compares it with the last state or with a threshold. If the condition is met, a message goes to the configured recipients, usually by email and with some tools also by Slack. The WordPress plugin AIOSEO, for example, checks for a noindex on the homepage and for failing robots.txt or XML sitemap loads, sends at most one alert per issue per day and can notify by email or Slack. Ahrefs offers alerts for new and lost backlinks, web mentions and keyword ranking changes.

An alert is only as good as its rule. If conditions are too broad, many messages pile up and get ignored (assessment).

Monitoring loop: measure, compare, alertA loop in six steps. 1 Fetch: request pages or data again. 2 Compare with the previous state, for example a changed title or status code 404 instead of 200. 3 Check a rule or threshold. Without a relevant deviation there is no alert, and the next fetch follows. With a deviation, 4 an alert goes to the responsible person, 5 review whether the change is real and intended, 6 fix. Then the next fetch begins. Schematic view based on practice.no relevant deviation → no alertdeviationnext fetch1 · Fetchrequest pages ordata again2 · Comparewith the previous state,e.g. status 200 → 4043 · Ruledoes a thresholdor rule match?4 · Alertnotify theresponsible person5 · Reviewreal change or falsealarm? Intended?6 · Fixfix the cause,verify the resultSchematic view based on practice. Each team sets its own interval and rules.
Monitoring loop based on practice: fetch again, compare with the previous state, check a rule or threshold. An alert follows only for a relevant deviation, then review and fix. This is not a standard; each team sets its own interval and rules. Schematic illustration.

Difference to Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a separate service that emails you when new results for a topic appear in Google Search. It watches mentions on the web. Search Console also sends emails, and users choose which message types they receive in the email settings.

Example

A monitor checks the robots.txt every day. When Disallow: / appears, the SEO team gets an email saying the file has changed. The example is invented.

Sources

  1. SEO Alerts - AIOSEO documentationaioseo.com
  2. Alerts - Ahrefsahrefs.com
  3. Create an alert - Google Search Helpsupport.google.com
  4. Email settings - Search Console Helpsupport.google.com

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