In my previous post, I gave an overview of Online Reputation Management (ORM) and the importance of adapting ORM in your business. Continuing on the topic of Online Reputation Management, here are some free tools that you can use to monitor your online reputation.

With the large number of tools available, you will need to do some research to determine which services fulfill your needs, or you can  retain the services of a professional organization to provide ORM services. Usually a mix of a few of these free services will cover your bases, but you will need time to do the manual work necessary for the tools that are not automated.

Link Monitoring

Other than using a simple Link:<your domain name> query on Google, Yahoo or Bing to see who links to your site you can use:

  1. WhoLinksToMe – A link search tool that tracks backlinks and makes them easily sortable by anchor text, origination, and by the target URL with enhanced reporting capability. You can also import links from Google Webmaster Tools for enhanced analysis.
  2. BackTweets – This is an engine to search for specific Twitter links. The service is provided by BackType

Twitter Monitoring

Use these tools to watch for any Twitter activity that mentions your name or your company name:

  1. Twitter Search – Twitter Search was formally Summize. It searches all Twitter activity for keywords, links or user activity in real time.
  2. TweetBeep – This tool provides hourly Twitter alerts sent via e-mail. You can specify keywords, people and links to track.
  3. Tweet Later – TweetLater has a number of features for Twitter users, and it also monitors Twitter and e-mails you a digest of the tweets that contain your specified keywords. You can also use this to track your @replies.
  4. Monitter – A real-time Twitter monitor for up to three keywords at a time.

Blog Monitoring

These tools are useful for monitoring blogs for any posts and comments that contain your company name:

  1. Google Blog Search – This is a Google beta search engine for blogs.
  2. Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing millions of blog posts in real time. It also tracks the authority, influence and popularity of blogs.
  3. BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a blog search engine with several complementary tools such as Trend Search and Conversion Tracker that analyzes the data it collects.
  4. BackType Blog Comments Monitoring – This tool indexes conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media. It also has an alert function that e-mails updates whenever a search term is mentioned in a comment.

Other Tools

Here’s a collection of other tools to monitor your reputation in forums, news, discussion boards, etc.

  1. Naymz – A social network focused on reputation, personal branding, and identity verification. Basic version is free.
  2. BoardTracker – This tool searches discussion boards and forum threads for your specified keywords. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts.
  3. MonitorThis – MonitorThis is a search aggregator for up to 26 search engine feeds.
  4. Google Alerts – Your keyword search results are sent via e-mail for keyword mentions in news, web, blogs, video and groups categories.
  5. Purewire Trust – An online portal that helps people verify reputation information about themselves and those with whom they interact online. You can search by e-mail address, URL or web application.
  6. Yasni – This is a search engine dedicated to finding people on the web through publicly available information, including images, videos, social networking profiles and posts.

I hope you’ll find these tools useful. Please post any comments regarding these or any other tools that you found useful in your ORM experience.

4 Responses to “Online Reputation Management: Free Tools to Monitor Your Reputation”

  1. Dr Harold O'Brien says:

    No experience yet, though looks promising. Meanwhile, how do I overcome the response offers repeated with such speed as to not leave enough time to answer the “allow/disallow” requested instruction — so that, whilst respondent is feeding in the “not allow” instruction, system is already asking it again!!

  2. admin says:

    Dr. O’Brien- Let us know which tools you try and how they work out for you. Additionally, if by response offers you are referring to pop-up ads, you may want to try a program such as AdBlock or an updated browser such as Firefox or Chrome.

  3. I would like to thank you for the important info presented here !

    It is important that whoever is interested in search engine reputation management will read it .

    Sincerely ,

    Timothy Weissbrot

  4. Nicky says:

    With the growth of Social media, reputation management will become more important. Social media starts to join the SEO game. SEO + Social media = BO. Brand optimalisation will become a new part for SEO. Google is looking already at the amount of fans, and followers. Your domain name is your most important brand online. Right now there are alot of different brand ranking indicators:
    - Facebook: Edge Rank
    - Google: PageRank
    - Twitter: Twitterrank
    - Google Plus: Author rank
    - Linkedin: Group influence indicator
    - Pinterest: ????

    I wonder how this will continue in the future. Great article!

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