Who’s Linking to Your Site? - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 96

Who's Using Your Word s?
some site-based information is easy to deine, such as who's linking to your urL, for example,
or the number of people who read your rss feed. More nebulous is the idea of your Web site's
content, and who is using it. Because content use is an issue with anyone who has a Web site, i
cover the topic in this chapter; because it is nebulous it gets its own sidebar.
usually the idea of someone using your content is bad: another site is reprinting your materials
with only an acknowledgement—or worse, no acknowledgement! And that does happen. But
there is potential good to people using your content, too. Maybe someone is using your rss
feed snippets as content on their site (and thus driving people to your site!). Maybe you have
an article you're trying to circulate and you want people to pick it up. Maybe you've been
encouraging other sites to link to yours with a short summary of your content, and you want to
see what sites are actually using the summary. good and bad, there are many reasons to want to
know if content related to your site is showing up on the Web.
there are two ways to do this. the irst way is probably the way you would expect: run a Web
search with a 10-15 word snippet of the content you want to monitor—the more unique, the
better ( Figure 6.4 ). Better yet, run two or three Web searches; google, Yahoo, and Msn are
all good choices.
Figure 6.4 use a unique sentence from your article, and you get a very concentrated list of results.