Using Google Alerts And Your Blog As Reputation Management Tools

(Search) You need to monitor your online reputation to be sure that information available about you and/or your company is mostly positive. But how do you do that? Bill Hartzer suggests using Google Alerts which is a free service from Google that emails you automatically whenever there are new Google results for your chosen search terms within News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups search.

I’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now. There’s no better way to keep tabs of your reputation online. If you add your name, nicknames, company name, and your domain name (URL) to your Google Alerts list then you should catch everything that is published about you online. Seriously, it should catch everything – good, bad, or neutral.

I had a blogger write a review of one of my blogs. Two splogs scraped her first paragraph, which included my name. They were porn-promoting websites on Blogspot, the biggest neighborhood for spam on the Web. I was notified of the legitimate blog review of me and both splogs in one Google Alert. That’s how quickly they scraped the content from the legitimate blog. It happened in less than one day because I have my Google Alerts set to notify me daily.

I immediately flagged the two splogs and notified the reviewing blogger that her content was being scraped and used for nefarious purposes. She flagged them and a friend of mine flagged them too. I highly recommend that you notify Google when something like this happens to you so that you can have those splogs shut down.

In this case, the damage done to me was minimal. The real damage was the stolen content that was written by another blogger. But what if a real reputation management crisis occurred and you found Google Alerts that carried some serious repercussions to your reputation attached. What should you do?

The answer lies in your blog. It’s the perfect reputation management tool because you can combat negative comments about you by posting more entries to your blog. If you don’t take proactive control over your reputation, someone else will.