Whether you’re an avid beauty fan or a fellow beauty blogger who just wants to check out the “competition”, this resource will be helpful. Here are our top 10 favorite places to find the best beauty blogs.
Professional Tracking Services
Konector is a professional service that tracks blogs. They list the top 299 beauty blogs which is very thorough (although I’m not sure why they couldn’t just make it an even 300!) They even offer a service where you can send an email to all the bloggers at once, which could be very valuable if you have a press release or an important blog post you want to pass on. However, you have to pay to join their service if you want detailed info on their top 300 (I mean, 299). The only free information you’ll get is whether or not the blog has a Twitter stream or an RSS feed.
Blogrank is our favorite service because they provide MUCH more detail. They rank blogs using an algorithm based on nine individual factors: Feedburner membership, Google Page Rank, unique monthly visitors, Yahoo and Google indexed pages, number of incoming links and ratio of links to pages, Alexa rank and Compete rank. It’s quite a thorough compilation! They update very frequently and the only downside is that they only list 50 blogs. I’d love to see their version of the top 100.
Google Blog Search
This approach won’t give you ranking of the best beauty blogs but it certainly generates a lot of possibilities. Just go to Google Blog Search, type in “beauty” and click “Homepages” on the left side bar. You’ll be presented with a list of over 1,000,000 blog homepages with beauty in the title.
Technorati
Technorati is a free blog tracking service with powerful search capabilities. Just type in “beauty” and you’ll find over 6,000 blogs on the topic along with their “authority” and Technorati rank.
Popular magazine blog rolls
Most of the beauty magazines either rank beauty blogs or at least have a blog roll you can peruse. Our favorite is Allure.com Daily Beauty Reporter’s “Sites We Love” sidebar (left-hand side, half way down the page.)
Other Beauty Blogs
Of course many beauty blogs compile their own list of faves. For example, here’s one from Makeup Moxie.
About.com and other information sites
About.com is a great source of information on just about any topic, so of course they have their own best beauty blog list. (BTW, The Beauty Brains was number 1 in their 2011 Readers Choice Poll!)
Skincare-news.com’s list is a bit dated (from 2009) but it features well written summaries for each blog. Then again, maybe I’m just biased because they described us as “a group of hip and witty cosmetic scientists answers your questions about beauty, skin care and hair by going beyond hype and enticing labels to explain the science behind it all.”
Link baiters
Some sites create a list of favorite blog and then ask the “winners” to link back to them so their site gets more Google juice. This is not necessarily a bad thing (there’s not such thing as bad publicity, just look at Charlie Sheen!) but if you’re using one of these sites as a reference just remember that the blogs they list may not be chosen for their objective quality as much as for the writer’s desire to get a link back. Regardless of their motivation, it’s still kind of flattering when it happens. Here’s one example: Spa Beauty School.
Where do YOU find your favorite beauty blogs? Leave a comment and share your secrets with the rest of the Beauty Brains community.