How can I be notified when my name is mentioned on the web?

Matt's answer:

Here’s a fun question. “Hi Matt. I have heard something about authors/content creators getting a notification if their name is written somewhere or searched for. How does this work, and how can I be known as a content creator? Best regards,” Morten Madsen in Denmark. So there’s a couple of different parts to this question. First, you asked about getting known if your name is written somewhere. And completely independent of being a content creator, one thing you can do is make a Google Alert for your name. And so if there’s some new news or some new content on the web that mentions your name, you can get a Google Alert about it. And, in theory, you could also make more specific Google Alerts, like you could use searches that would return your content. And that could maybe help you find if there’s other copies of your content showing up on the web. The other part of the question was if your name is searched for. And we don’t really have an Alert’s functionality to say, someone searched for your names, so we’re going to let you know. If your name is popular enough, then there are various research tools that we provide– Google Insights for Search and those kinds of things, where you can see the kinds of things that people query for. But for just an average person’s name, there’s probably not going to be enough data for that. And then the last question is how can I be known as a content creator? It’s a tough question. We’re always looking at ways to figure out even more and even better, who are the content creators, and what is the original content, and how do we return that in our search results? But one thing that you can do is use what’s known as the REL=AUTHOR tag. And that basically says, the author of this particular content is located over here. It’s a way to annotate web content to sort of say, this is mine. I lay claim to it. And by the way, here’s a picture of me, here’s my name, that sort of thing. And I think if we can move from just anonymous text, where we don’t know who wrote what, to a more rich model of knowing who wrote what on the web or at least trying to move in that direction, then that can result in a lot of rewards for content creators, for users, and then, as a result, for search engines. So hope that helps with some of those different questions. And I definitely would explore the REL=AUTHOR, because if you can annotate that content, that can be a good way to send some hints towards Google in terms of how we should be ranking things.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: