Google Web Alert Hack: Is Somebody Talking About You Behind Your Back?

How to discover online friends you didn’t know you had and drive website traffic when a Google Alert tips you off to new link-building opportunities.

Our recent post about How to Defend Your Online Content from Theft prompted Michael Geneles, of 87 Interactive, to contact us with this tip:

Let’s say you want to create an alert for anytime that Google picks up on someone linking to your site/blog. On top of being a potentially nice monitoring feature, it’s also a great networking tactic. If someone is reading and linking to your blog, you might want to comment back.

For this kind of alert go to Google Alerts and put this in the search term box — link:http://www.yourblogurl.com (yourblogurl is, of course, the address of your blog).

In the ‘type’ box, choose comprehensive or just blog if you only want blog links. You can also select daily, weekly and as-it-happens delivery. The choice is yours.

Another opportunity to make Google your promotion partner

Michael’s tip is very useful for alerting you to bloggers and links. And you can use the Google Alerts robot for many other purposes.

You could scour the web repeatedly for new information about your company or niche topic. Or simply use Google Alerts do an automated search for you every day and return the results by email or via RSS feeds.

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Google Alerts works tirelessly to:

• Safeguard your reputation.
• Learn where you or your company is cited or quoted.
• Monitor a developing news story.
• Detect copyright infringement.
• Generate sales leads.
• Discover new web pages published about your niche topic.
• Track current developments of a competitor or industry.
• Ferret out a plagiarist.
• Smoke out an unfair detractor or rumor monger.
• Uncover a new white paper whose title uses a keyword phrase.

A Google “Blogs” alert can tip you off to the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice. Blog search has specialized queries like [inblogtitle:], [inposttitle:], [inpostauthor:], and [blogurl:].

A Google “Video” alert can inform you of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice.

A Google “Groups” alert can notify you of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice.

You can create up to 1,000 alerts, including multiple languages.

Google Alerts is one of our favorite free research tools. It can be an invaluable aid in creating editorial content.

You can use it to access statistics for use in articles and blog posts, identify potential alliances and joint ventures, and review the strength of your brand.