Over the last eighteen months there has been an abundance of SEO (including mine), most provide informative and insightful SEO guides, tips and strategies. I have also come across many that have good intentions but offer very little value to other search marketers and often posts can be misleading to newcomers to the industry.

There are however a select few that continue to provide quality content on a weekly basis that I believe should be on every SEO’s RSS subscription.

1. SEOMOZ

SEOMOZ are an SEO company based in Seattle in the US and have become an anchor in the SEO industry. The leader of the pack so to speak would be Rand Fishkin who has continued to create great post content. The site offers a selection of free SEO tools to assist with analysis and they offer a members area which contains even more. Altogether I cannot find a better SEO blog out there, it’s that simple. I suggest you visit them immediately and start learning or touching up on your SEO skills.

SEOMOZ blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/seomoz

2. Search Engine People

Search Engine People are a Canadian based SEO company that have another fabulous blog that every SEO should be subscribed to. At the forefront of the great insights is Jeff Quipp. It’s strategy in this blog that I find most important, proven methods in dealing with the different scenarios of internet marketing, it’s bloody good dust I tell you.

Search Engine People blog feed: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/feed/

3. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is great for a number of reasons but what I like is when technical information or data comes up in posts that it’s always written in a way that is understandable to almost anyone, really great writing styles. The most recognizable character on the team would have to be Danny Sullivan the man who brought us our beloved Sphinn. They always deliver great quality and is a must for every SEO!

Search Engine Land’s blog feed: http://feeds.searchengineland.com/searchengineland

4. Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal has a selection of very good blog authors, I tend to get the most value from Ann Smarty, and her posts are so detailed there’s never a short read! They provide insights and links to great tools and content that as an SEO you just can’t ignore.

Search Engine Journals blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineJournal

5. Seo Scientist

A lot of other SEO’s would probably argue that there are more deserving SEO blogs to get this number 5 spot. Branko Rihtman is the author of this absolutely fantastic blog. As the name might suggest these blog posts are based around the inner workings of search engine behaviors, with extremely detailed posts and data to back up findings. The frequency of the posts is far less than others but when content is posted you can guarantee you will learn at least 1 new piece of information.

SEA Scientist’s blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoScientist

• Honourable mentions and still recommend signing up to their feeds:

• http://feeds.searchenginewatch.com/sew
  http://www.seobook.com/rss.xml
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/SearchEngineRoundtable1
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/searchengineguide
  http://feeds.feedburner.com/Wolf-howl
  http://www.seobythesea.com/?feed=rss2
• And SeoUnique’s = http://feeds.feedburner.com/SeoUniqueBlog

Google have been clear and expressed their feelings about paid links. We all know we shouldn’t do it, it’s against the webmaster guidelines, you can get penalties and even removals from the index.

I will put my hand up and say I have dabbled in buying links, if you’re talking to an SEO who says they’ve never done it then they may be fibbing (or they have only been doing SEO for a short period of time).

We all know the following:

• Buying links for PR is not allowed
• Selling links to pass PR is not allowed
• Buying links to manipulate the SERPS is not allowed
• Excessive link exchanges are not allowed

There is of course the snitch form report a paid link form by which members of the law abiding public can notify Google if they detect any paid links on a web page. Google can then take their appropriate levels of action towards the websites in question.

Besides from the awesome report a baddie form Google uses variables in their algorithm to detect paid links automatically. Webmasters often leave a trail when adding paid links, be it through code comments, stupid ad placements, link relevancy, backlink increases and trends over time – heck there’s probably a hundred more factors.

Now, to get to my point, in 2005 there were a recorded 60 million blogs worldwide so you can imagine the 2008 figure could be close to 100 million. My preferred method of blogging is WordPress; it’s simple, easy to setup and pretty damn search engine friendly. So say 40% (my personal estimate) of all blogs worldwide are run using WordPress, that’s 40 million blogs all with the option to use their “blogroll”.

For you that don’t know what a blogroll is, it is a widget that can be used on blog themes that displays links that you can add through the CMS. Although you can get plugins that change the link relationship to NoFollow, it’s not a popular choice. To be honest why should you change the relationship? If you like websites and think they add value to your website, bloody link to them.

I can’t help but think that there must be hundreds of millions of links all originating from blogrolls alone, a good percentage of these will be paid links, purely because it’s easy to setup and harder for Google to recognise the link, i.e. it won’t have the same characteristics as say a footer link. Unless you are building too many links, using the same kinds of anchor texts, how will Google know your links in the blogroll are genuine or paid? (site relevance must also be a factor).

How Google will react to the continued war on paid links?

My guess is they will discount all blogroll links entirely, either by looking at the website code or making a deal with the blogging software companies and making the default setup NoFollow. I know it sounds rash and perhaps this is the ramblings of a tired man coming to the end of a long hard week? Who knows…