As someone who has studiously put together the top 10 business blog listings since 2006 (here’s the first such post that garnered over 120 comments — long standing record on this blog), I was glad to see another post posing the question “Are these the 10 best corporate blogs in the world?” via Ragan.

Written by Mark Schaefer, who recently taught a class on corporate blogging at Rutgers, the post covers interesting blogs that are not too promotional nor technology focused and I’m glad he did put together this list, cos one of these blogs even crept into our top 10 listings. Read on.

Couple of quick thoughts before I present to you the latest ranking of the most popular corporate blogs on the planet (methodology for the ranking is given below). The reason I started tracking these rankings was to identify the corporate blogs that stand the test of time within certain commonly agreed upon criteria. What’s interesting is that the top 10 blogs have pretty much stayed the same over time with the inclusion of some fast growing blogs (like Mint and this week’s new entrant – Whole Foods).

Without further ado, I give you the current state of the corporate blogosphere and the Top 10 corporate blogs ranked by Technorati [Disclosure: I run LinkedIn’s corporate blog, since 2007, which has been a Top 10 blog].

Top 10 Corporate Blogs in 2011 (per Technorati Authority)

• Google [Authority: 792]
• Twitter [Authority: 703]
• Mint [Authority: 603] & Delta [Authority: 603]
• LinkedIn [Authority: 578] & Facebook [Authority: 578]
• Whole Foods [Authority: 572] 
• Yahoo! Search [Authority: 557]
• Garmin [Authority: 544]
• Yahoo! [Authority: 530]

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• Adobe [Authority: 523]
• eBay [Authority: 513]
• Southwest Airlines [Authority: 465]
• Manpower [Authority: 412]
• Patagonia [Authority: 404]

General Motors, Monster, Dell and Digg have fallen off the Top 15 list. In particular, I’m surprised by Dell’s fall since I bet it has something to do with their restructured domain space (Yahoo! had the same problem), cos I know how well managed they both are. The ones in red are the blogs that are going down in the rankings and the green ones are either new entrants or the ones that are rising (some, fast) in popularity – for e.g. Delta and Whole Foods.

Note: Click through the above brand names to get to their corporate blog and feel free to bookmark them or subscribe to their posts on your favorite RSS reader.

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Methodology: I’m using the New PR Wiki (Corporate blog listings) and Technorati authority to help navigate the corporate blogosphere terrain. This term made most sense to rank corporate blogs for 2 reasons.

1. Popularity

“It is the # of blogs linking to a website in the last 6 months. The higher the number, the more authority the blog has”.

Not only does that give a clear indication of the popularity, it also provides context for this rank in the past 6 months. You’ll be surprised at the number of dead blogs in the list, since the last ranking.

2. It’s the number of blogs vs. number of links that’s being measured

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days

Also, if you find any corporate blog (official) that find themselves in the middle of the above rankings, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Given my experience, both starting and running a corporate blog, I’ll continue investigating best practices and sharing them here. If you’re interested in learning more, please consider subscribing to this blog.

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