There's no shortage of posts and tutorials built around setting up a monitoring dashboard. Everyone has a favorite. Mine is from Marty Wientraub from Aim Clear (see How to Build a Reputation Monitoring Dashboard). There are new services that spring up every few months about monitoring like Scout Labs and Trackur, a lot of which are very good products. However in some cases those products are like driving a Ferrari to the supermarket to pick up a quart of milk: it's just overkill and too much power for the job. Sometimes you just need a quick, easy solution for the task at hand. Here's how I do it.

If you're an account manager for a large firm, or "the guy" in a one man operation, you should always be on the lookout for tools that you can use to automate the low level and receptive work. Google Alerts is one of those tools. There are some smart ways you can get Google Alerts to work for you.

When you set up Google Alerts, if you choose the "email" delivery option and choose "once a day," you should know that the first alert will come about 24 hours later. It will repeat every day at about the same time. So if you want your alerts to come at 9 am every morning, set them up just before 9 am and you're all set. The one problem with this is that, if you adjust an alert, the time resets to the last time you adjusted it. It would be nice if Google gave us the ability to specify a delivery time, but that's not the case. If you choose "as it happens," you'll get email alerts at random times during the day. There are some cases where you want this, and we'll get into that below, but in most cases I recommend once per day.

The second thing you need to know is that Google recently changed the filtering methodology in an attempt to show/send fewer alerts. When you set up an alert, you can specify the maximum number of results, either 20 or 50. This setting also seems to correspond to how sensitive the filter is. Set it to 50 and you'll get deeper, less trusted sites showing up; set it to 20 and the results will show only the more trusted results. The truth is you need both (again, we'll get into that below). It would be nice if Google gave us the option to choose trusted/all results independent of the number, but that's not the case.

Lastly I recommend setting up an alias email address specifically for Google Alerts. When you go on vacation or will be out of the office for a few days, you don't want the emails piling up in your inbox. You might want them to forward to someone else or temporarily get deleted. In a perfect world you would have two aliases: one for the priority alerts, another for the standard ones. Again, more on that below.

Ok let's get down to business. The following tactic is built upon one that was first talked about by Patrick Aloft a few years ago (see How to Use Google Alerts to Find Out if Your Site Gets Hacked). What we are trying to do is trap for certain conditions that we need to know about. I divide my alerts into two blocks: things I need to know about as soon as possible and things that I need to know about that aren't time sensitive. These are the three Google Alerts I set up for every site I run and every client site I work on.

viagra OR cialis OR levitra OR Phentermine OR Xanax site:wolf-howl.com

poker OR casino OR hold-em OR holdem site:wolf-howl.com

nude OR naked OR sex OR porn site:wolf-howl.com

When I set up these alerts I want to know ASAP when it happens, because it means someone has hacked the server, or some content was published or approved that probably shouldn't have been. I also want all the results, whether trusted or not. I can deal with a few false positives, but not getting an alert I wanted would be bad. Recently, Rand linked to a post by Richard Baxter showing that spam keywords that were nofollowed in the comment section had an effect on rankings, so you want to watch out for this stuff. I split/grouped the terms to make it easy to maintain. You could use one big long query joined with "OR" statements, but you run the risk of things "breaking" much more easily. As a result, I like to keep it manageable and under 4 or 5 terms.

The next set of terms I set up only come once a day and don't have to be as extensive, so I limit it to 20 results. Here are the terms I use:

wolf-howl.com {site:facebook.com OR site:digg.com OR site:delicious.com OR site:stumbleupon.com OR site:mixx.com OR site:reddit.com}

site: wolf-howl.com

wolf-howl.com site:twitter.com

Depending on the total number of alerts you're getting, you can bulk them all together.  Adjusting the setup times or getting the alerts in batches throughout the day is up to you.

One last tip. In addition to using the "OR" phrase as in the examples above, you can also use negative phrases. Here's an example of one that that I use for a vanity search for my name:

"michael gray" -dj -uk -football -police

There is a famous DJ who share my name and -dj eliminates most of his results. There is a UK soccer/football player who shares my name as well. Since I have a fairly common name it's becoming more frequent that Google comes across arrest records from newspapers with people who share my name; the "-police" takes care of most of that. The way I figure, if I did get arrested, hopefully I'd know about it before Google does. :-)

Michael Gray has over 10 years experience in website development and internet marketing. He has helped companies with internal search engine optimization strategies for both ecommerce and informational websites. He publishes controversial industry thoughts and observations on his blog at www.wolf-howl.com.