Expert Tip: How To Use Google Alerts To Monitor Links To Your Profiles and Sites

Knowing how to use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you or your company online is a fundamental skill for managing reputation on the web. Setting up a host of keyword alerts for your name or company brand is a great start, but here’s the rub…what if you have a common name like “John Smith”, or someone writes about you and uses just your first name, or worse yet, something more…ahem..creative? You’re hosed. Not anymore. Here are a few expert tips to help you get more mileage out of your alerts…

Your Best Friends And Worst Enemies Rarely Use Your Full Name

Familiarity and creativity tend to come from one of two extremes – people who you have strong relationships with, or those that want want to talk about you but distance themselves from you. The funny thing is, these are the people you want to monitor most. A good friend might write  “I was chatting with John about this” in a blog post and be talking about you, but unless that friend shot you a note and told you that she “mentioned” you in the post, you’d never know – and that’s probably a conversation you’d be interested in joining! Then there’s the guy who wants to sing from the hills just how hard they think you and your company sucks. If that guy knows how Google alerts work, he  might try and get creative or vague with your name, or just leave it out entirely and link to your site (there are thousands of examples of this on the web). In both cases, you want to know about what’s going on and be able to engage the friend or enemy quickly.

People Use Links To Indicate Identity And Show Relationships On The Social Web

People often don’t use full names on the web because they don’t need to. Linking to someone’s site,  social media profile or blog article is much more effective for clearly showing who or what you’re talking about. I could just say “I had a great chat with Robert on FriendFeed” and you know that I’m talking about Robert Scoble. People use linking like this to talk positively and negatively about people, brands and products every single day, and monitoring this with basic keyword alerts is impossible. But you can monitor it…

Use Google Alerts To Know Whenever Someone Links to Your Blog or One of Your Social Profiles.

If you monitor links as well as keywords, you’ll adapt to the blogosphere’s writing culture and catch a LOT more of the instances discussed above. Here’s the ninja skill. With a small change of syntax in a Google Alert, you can monitor when anyone links to any web page, including your blog, social profiles etc. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts            (you’ll need a Google account, so set one up if you haven’t already)

2. Instead of entering keywords into the “Search Terms” box, cut and paste the link to the site, page or profile you want to get inbound link alerts for like this…. “link:[putyourURLhere]”

3. You can configure the alert to get sent to you as it happens (the moment Google knows, you know), or you can get it to send you a summary at the end of the day or week. For this type of monitoring, I’d recommend as-it-happens, but if you’re heavily into social media and interact a lot, you may want to go for just a daily summary.

Note: This strategy works GREAT for finding out when people write about you and link to your blog or a static social media profile like LinkedIn or Facebook, but you’ll get mixed results with links to more dynamic profiles like Twitter (you’ll get an alert every time someone adds you and you show up in their “following” box on their profile).

Know of any other neat tricks? Please let us know in the comments!