It is great that there are Googlers (Google employees) out there blogging — sharing their thoughts, ideas and commentary with the rest of the world (including us SEOs!). But most of the stuff just isn’t of any value to anyone but their friends and family. I could care less that they went on a hike or that their cat just had kittens. There’s the obviously Google corporate blogs like Inside AdSense and Inside AdWords (and no I’m not counting the self-congratulatory corporate spin machine, er, I mean the “Official Google Blog” of the PR dept.) that are really valuable and worth reading by us SEOs. And then there are the hidden gems — individual Googlers speaking their mind on whatever’s important or interesting to them — on their own personal blogs. I’ve done a bit of digging, because the list of Googler blogs on the Official Google Blog is woefully incomplete. Thankfully, Googlers tend to link to other Googlers, so it didn’t take too much detective work to find most of their blogs. So, without any further ado, here is my list of my top 10 favorite Googler blogs (from the standpoint of an SEO):

1. Matt Cutts — Duh, of course! Matt’s blog rocks!
2. crazybob.org — Some good stuff for technoweenies intermixed with baby photos (move those to another blog please, Bob!)
3. massless — Lots of noise to wade through, with the occasional gem like this one
4. snarfed.org — Their excellent gmail vs pine post was recently slashdotted and it brought their blog’s server down. A nice problem to have. 😉
5. Xenomachina — I’m really into Firefox, so his excellent Firefox annoyances post alone earned him a spot on this list.
6. Ego Food — Chris recently posted to his blog a link to download a free copy of his latest book, Open Sources 2.0. Way to share, Chris!
7. What is left? — I really like Chris’ book recommendations (listed in the right-hand column). I agree, Freakonomics is awesome! Also, his Yahoo for lunch! post made for a fun read.
8. techwalla — Not too much here, just stuff about two projects he’s made available (Tiny Gus and PartyChat). Akshay actually has two blogs. His other one was kinda interesting too, but nothing really relevant for SEOs there.
9. shellen dot com — This Google Reader project manager makes it onto my list out of sheer staying power. He’s been blogging since July 2000! Jason also keeps an interesting collection of links in his link blog (on the right-hand column).

And the “Nonstarter Award” for Googler blogs goes to… The Coincidental Life of a Non-Actor — This is so bad I felt I needed to nofollow the link. (Sorry, Steven, but I just can’t “vouch for” your lame blog and pass it PageRank. I’m sure you understand…) If you want ALL the Googler blogs (cat blogs and all) in one place, then head over to Googlers’ Blogs where they offer a heap of Googlers’ blogs syndicated onto a single web page and into a single RSS feed. Happy reading!