Aries Penguin - Local Search Guru

The following are some business blogs I follow.  These have direct ties to the internet and the search market.

Burnham’s Beat - Bill has a very lite posting schedule.  That is the only drawback to this blog.  He is well informed and offers a unique look at business.

John Battelle - John is a published author.  He is also an avid music lover.  His blog is sprinkled with personal developments and search engine news.  His yearly predictions are usually very close. 

Laserlike - A contributer on the GigaOM blog.  These are posts from a VC’s point of view.  I just subscribed to his blog and appreciate his writing style.

 Out of my Gord - Interesting blog posts on a lite posting schedule.

Buzfactor - A brand new blog.  I read a guest post and had to subscribe.

I follow these blogs to keep up on internet developments.

Marketing Pilgrim - Andy Beal is the reputation management expert.  He has a team of writers who report on internet developments and announcements.  A good place to start if keeping up with the major internet news is a priority.

GigaOM – A former writer of the now defunct Business 2.0 magazine. (I loved that mag!)  He and his team focus on general internet news and innovations.  Good, in depth articles are the main stay of this blog.

Search Engine Land - Danny Sullivan heads this blog.  He has been the “go to” guy in search for well over 10 years.  His opinion carries big weight in the community.  The blog is a great summary service of what’s going on out there.

Search Engine Watch - Danny’s old blog.  This blog was once the place to go if you needed to know.  Since then, it’s a shadow of it’s former self.  Good thing you get an interesting post now and then.

Traffick - Andrew is Canadian and a PPC expert.  He is a published author and has a light posting schedule.  The posts are well thought out, with a unique Canadian point of view.  I subscribed to his blog after a heated discussion on PPC click fraud rates.

Here are the blogs I read that deal with search engine marketing and optimization. 

Search Engine Journal - This blog has some interesting SEO specific posts.  They do a good job keeping you informed of general SEO and SEM practices.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog – This blog is an in depth look at the industry.  If you were to follow one SEO blog, make it this one.  Rand has some great cutting edge articles.  SEOmoz also has a large paid membership.  They also have many SEO tools that may be of benefit.

I keep up on Local Search following these blogs.

Screenwerk - Greg has the inside track on new local search development.  His continued philosophy that “everything is local” needs strong consideration. 

Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search - Mike seems to be the only support you can find for Google Maps.  Unfortunately for Mike, he’s not on Google’s payroll.  His blog gives you a better understanding of Google Maps.

Yahoo Feeds - I subscribe to Yahoo Feeds with the keywords “yellow pages” and “local search”.  You get a little bit of noise but it’s worth the effort.  I also use this service for reputation management.

I have read Andy Beal’s blog, Marketing Pilgrim for years.  Andy approached me a couple of years ago about writing guest blog posts.  My first post was a piece on PPC click fraud.  In it I suggested that creating a content network and either hiring or developing a bot network could pose a big threat to PPC.  Since then, a couple of bot networks have been discovered.  Even Google has admitted they have found one.  Most recently, Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against a Canadian for depleting PPC accounts of competitors.  No one has admitted how he did it but I suspect a bot network of some sort.

I followed up that PPC article with another related post the 12 Ways of Click Fraud  These were points I created to help people realize the depth of click fraud.  The post was inspired by Google’s claim that click fraud is only 2%.  You can find some other articles related to click fraud on Andy’s site.  Just do a search for “zombie” for a good list. 

I also published an open letter of sorts.  It calls for the major internet players to eliminate email SPAM.  Email SPAM accounts for over 95% of email traffic on the web.  The elimination or reduction of this useless traffic should be high priority.  Google has recently started a “make the web faster” program.  Again, they should start with useless bandwidth waste instead of targeting web site owners for quicker downloads. 

I continue to subscribe to the Marketing Pilgrim blog and am a semi-frequent commenter.