The Top 28 Free Wine Blogs – an initial list based off Blog Search Engines

I’ve been looking into what wine blogs would be best for a wine retailer. The best in terms of how many sales you would get from being associated with them.

To read more about the process so far check out:

• Background on this wine blog list
• A wine blogger’s audience vs a wine retailer’s shopper base
• A first, but failed, attempt at making a list
• Different wine social media types

In the posts above I’ve been painstakingly working my why through the first of the three steps.

The three steps being:

1. Come up with an initial list. This will end up as a manual process so I can’t do it for all 500+ wine blogs.
2. Come up with comparative traffic volume (e.g. Alexa). I also need it by demography to fit the target audience.
3. Use quality factors to rank them such as how many authority sites link to them (a kind of “page rank”).

Note that this is about free wine blogs, so some very good but (partly) fee-incurring blogs have been put to one side for their own list in another post .

Here’s the results of Step 1.

Initial list of Wine Blogs

Selected blogs designated with an *. Also listed in the original Google docs spreadsheet (which is easier to read).

The blogs were selected on the following basis

• In the Google Blog Search top 10
• In the PostRank top 3 (EDIT 6/8 : Cinderalla taken out (store not blog, replaced with vinography)
• In the Yahoo Directory top 3
• Enobytes has top rankings in Google Blog Search and Technorati. Catavino has top rankings in PostRank, Ala Wine, Blogbridge. On the Wine Trail in Italy has top rankings in Technorati, Ala Wine, Blogged, Wikio. James Goode’s has top rankings in Alexa, blogs.com, Cellarer, Food & Wine, Top Wine Blogs
• The following have 1 medium authority blog search listing + 1 other listing: Savour Each Glass, Basic Juice, Elevage, The Cavemans, Spirit of Wine, Brooklyns Guys, Bigger than your Head, My Wine Education.
• High Authority Blog Search Engines: Google Blog Search, PostRank, Yahoo Directory. Medium Authority: Technorati, Alexa, Ala Wine.

So was I objective and transparent?

I reckon I have been transparent. Certainly up to the “1 medium authority blog search listing + 1 other listing” blogs where I had to be a touch subjective about how authoritative the blog search engines were (I’ve also previously had to be subjective in deciding what is a free blog vs a pro blog or online magazine).

Was I accurate?

To the extent that I’ve chosen 28 top wine blogs for the start of August for wine retailers I reckon I’m very close. Blog Search engines apparently weight more recent posts higher so you could say this will change (but I don’t think by much).

EDIT: Wonder why vinography didn’t make it further up the rankings?

However if you think I’ve made a mistake please comment below, I’m very open to any ideas and feedback.

Notes:

• List is not a ranking (yet).
• This an initial list only – based on the Blog Search Rankings in the columns.
• In my previous post I mentioned that Technorati search and directories were a little frustrating so I ended up using Google search to search Technorati. Google search operators were: site:technorati.com/blogs AND intext:Authority inanchor:wine OR intext:wine -video -pitches