Have you ever wondered if anybody at all links to your blog? Do you know how to find out if anybody talks about you on the Web? Do you know how to get notified every time someone mentions your name?

I’ve seen this several times before - people, especially young bloggers (young not by age, but by experience), want to know if they were mentioned in any way on the Web and what people are saying about them. But the solution to the problem is not obvious, so it automatically goes into the “high-tech black magic” category and they never try to find out.

Well, it turns out, tracking yourself on the web is not that complicated. There are many ways and techniques to do it, and I’ll tell you about a couple of them here and now. Really simple ones.

Google Blogsearch.

This is one of the variations of the famous Google search engine. It search only through the web sites which Google considers to be blogs. The search results are presented in a slightly different way - with publishing dates and RSS and Atom feeds.

How can you use it? Well, just try a search for your name. If your name is unique on the web, then just use it as it is. Otherwise, you might want to search for your name and surname. In this case, use quote marks like so: “Leonid Mamchenkov”. Quotes tell Google to search for all documents where both your name and surname appear, and not just one of those. This way you will eliminate search results about other people, including, maybe your relatives.

Did you find anything? Are people talking about you? What are they saying?

Now, you can also search for blogs that link to your web site. This time we’ll use Google’s “link:” keyword. If I want to find all blogs that link to my personal blog, which is at http://mamchenkov.net/wordpress/ , I’ll search Google for “link:mamchenkov.net”. This time though without quotation marks. Also, make sure that you don’t have any spaces between “link”, column, and the URL of your web site.

Did you find anything now? Is there anything you haven’t seen before?

One of the features of Google Blog Search which is not present in regular Google search is RSS/Atom feeds. When you see the search results for your query, check out the column on the left, the one with published dates. There are two links a bit lower - one for RSS feed, and another one for Atom feed. Those are basically the same things, just in different formats. Pick either one and add it to your RSS reader (you do use an RSS reader, don’t you?). Now, your RSS reader will ask Google Blog Search for any new results every hour or so and if anything new pops up, you’ll know about it.

Of course you can setup several searches with several RSS feeds and subscribe to them all too. In fact, those searches don’t even have to be about you. You can pick any subject you like - blogging, Cyprus, your relatives, your company, your competitors, your sports team, and so on. Whenever anyone posts anything new about the topic you are interested in, you’ll know about it. No need to repeat your searches manually.

Now, with blogosphere it’s all clear. But what can we do about the rest of the Web? There are web sites, which aren’t yet considered to be blogs. And there are sometimes better results from the traditional Google search than those from the Google Blog search. Is there a way to monitor those results? Yes, indeed. Differently though.

Google Alerts.

As I said above, RSS and Atom feeds are not available in the traditional Google Search. But there is another solution - Google Alerts. If you already use any Google services, like Gmail or Blogger, you can login with your Google Account. Otherwise, you’ll need to create a new account, which is quite easy.

After you have an account, you can define your alerts. An alert will be sent to your email address once there is a new search result for your query. You can search for your name or for web sites that link to you, or web sites about your favourite topic. You can choose if you want Google web search, or Google Image search, or other Google search engines, or all of them together. Once you created your alert, Google will email you every time a new result is found for your search term.

Again, you can have as many alerts as you need. You can use different accounts to direct alerts to different email addresses. Or you can use filters in your email application to sort emails into different folders.

Depending on your personal preferences, you might like email alerts better than RSS feeds. Than you can setup alerts for Google Blog Search too - it doesn’t have to be manual or RSS only.

If Google is not your search engine of choice, then check the functionality of your favourite one. Many search engines these days provide the functionality for tracking search results either via email notifications or RSS feeds.

Having any troubles? Found any interesting way to use these features? Share with us in the comments.