I thought I would share this tip because I think many webmasters probably do not know about it.

Use Google Alerts to see who's posting about you:
Google Alerts is a little-known, free service from Google that allows you to setup alerts based on keywords. Each time a new page is found by Google containing your keywords an email is automatically sent to you. Google Alerts says it like this:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story


• keeping current on a competitor or industry


• getting the latest on a celebrity or event


• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

I use Google Alerts for all my domain names as well as common misspellings of a few of my domains. Every time someone makes a blog post about my sites or, more importantly posts a link to any of my sites, GoogleAlerts lets me know. Google-Alerts also lets me know every time some scraper steals more of my hard-earned content.

A side benefit of using Google Alerts is that it can give you an idea of how long Google is taking to index your pages. By using Google Alerts I have found that in the last year Google has gone from taking several days to index my new blog posts to only 1-2 hours. Google likes me!

For fun I've also created a GoogleAlert with my name in it. It's interesting to see what other people write about me and it's also funny to see how many other interesting people there are in the world with my name.

http://www.google.com/alerts