Every day in the United States there are dozens of lawsuits filed for libel and slander on the internet. The internet itself is like a stew of lies and innuendo where anyone can post almost anything about any company or person without much worries. Because of this, competitors, ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, jealous co-workers, and anyone else with a grudge against you or your business, can smear your name or your companies name all over the place. If I wanted to I could make up an elaborate story about how my neighbor, whom I don't really like, sells drugs out of his basement, and goes around pushing down old ladies. I could make it a lot worse then that, but for the sake of this article I won't get into the gruesome details of my sick and twisted imagination. I could then quite easily make it rank fairly high in Google for when his name is searched. Of course I wouldn't ever do this, but it would take maybe an hour at most, and wouldn't put me in danger legally at all.

So, how can you make sure lies are not being told by people about you or your business? If you are not familiar with Google Alerts, become familiar with it. Basically the system allows you to set up email alerts for any word or phrase. Whenever a new web page is indexed with that word or phrase you instantly will get an email from Google with a link to it. This is an amazing and very practical way to track your reputation, and make sure that if something negative does get posted you can quickly either post a comment about it to clear up any misunderstandings, or contact the webmaster to have them remove the slanderous material. Google Alerts also allows you to track the keywords via a web feed, it's called Google Reader, and that's if you don't want a bunch of email in your inbox each day.

Google Alerts is complete free for anyone who has an account with Google. The best advice I can give you is to set up a Gmail account and start a comprehensive alert for your first and last name as a phrase. If you have a very uncommon last name, than just putting your last name in may be ok as well. If you run a business, then set up an alert for your web address, phone number and business name.