According to the survey, which SEOQuake Team recently conducted among its users, most of the specialists in search marketing thinks that blogs are one of the most authoritative source of professional information. This is natural – Internet is huge and professional blogs serve as the aggregator and filter of the information flow. Most people have their favorite authors (and SEOQuake Team is no exception) – the leaders of opinion – that we treat with great confidence.
So we decided to check, how much Google loves SEO-blogs.
The study was conducted on the domains. It is clear that a private blog can not draft with such monsters as Search Engine Watch, where in addition to the blog there are lots of other information, but there are a number of indicators that can assess the effectiveness of traffic control, for example, the average cost of a visitor coming from the organic results or how the trust is a list of keywords on which the domain gets traffic.
We have decided to take the Top SEO blogs, published in Invesp.com in August 2008 as a basis. Remoteness of the publication didn’t scare us because really popular and authoritative blogs were included in the list, and the study itsef seemed interesting and objective to us.
Obviously, we use our own service SEMRush as a tool for research.
For those who are not familiar with it yet, we are going to explain. SEMRush.com has a database of more than 30 million keywords on which it examines TOP20 of Google organic results, as well as AdWords, and provides information for more than 12mln. domains.
Here is a list of the surveyed blogs, sorted by the amount of traffic from Google organic results according to the SEMRush.com:

The last row in this table looks funny, and we have met this curios situation several times during the research. It seems that Google does not like the Matt Cutts blog. You can believe in? We can’t. ? It is possible that we get this data because until recently, the Matt Cutts blog was located at the domain www.mattcutts.com. Undoubted leader in the number of traffic is Search Engine Watch, but do not forget that this is not just a blog, but a great professional portal.

Now it would be interesting to find out if the traffic engaged by bloggers valuable.
We sort the domains with blogs again, this time by the value of the traffic, which they receive from Google organic results. Here, it is necessary to clarify that the value of organic traffic is estimated by SEMRush, as if the traffic is purchased in AdWords.

As you can see, the leader is the same as in the previous rating. Matt Cutts also didn’t surprised us. But there were some disruption within the list, which we believe illustrates the assumption that not all popular SEO authors equally loved by Google.
And how do they attract this traffic? Using what keywords? For the beginning, let’s find out, how many keywords bloggers use to get traffic from organic results.

The situation in this rating is very similar to the one we saw in the previous two cases. To see if the keywords on which our domains receive traffic are target, you can look into the Keyword Report, by following the link next to each domain. According to our observations, the quality of traffic is directly proportional to the height of the provisions of a domain in our rating.
As mentioned above, it is difficult to compare a private blog and electronic media on such parameters as the number and total cost of the traffic involved. But you can compare them by an average cost of a visitor. Let’s do it.

Here we see a more objective picture. Search Engine Watch, the leader of the previous rating is only at 7 and the top spot with a serious gap is headed by the Online Marketing Blog, but on the 3 spot, we see SEO Scoop, which were hanging in the tail up to this moment.
With regard to assessing the quality of traffic, SEMRush has its own rating (SEMRush Rank), which is based on an assessment of the following indexes:

- Number of users who come from the Google search engine
- Cost of search traffic
SEMRush rating indicates how well a website is optimized, and how effective it buys ads in AdWords.
In the following table, we have represented a number of positions of domains under analysis in SEMRush Rank.

By the way, speaking about AdWords campaigns, at the time of the last SEMRush database update, there were 2 advertising campaigns of the studied domains, and here is data on them:

For each domain you may see the link to AdWords keywords report, where you can find a list of words for which it is advertised. With regard to Search Engine Watch, they have more than target keywords in a campaign. It is obvious that great specialists work for the site.

Well, that’s all. We hope that our little research will help you to find your bearings on the informational ground.

At your service,
SEOQuake Team