If you haven’t heard of Tumblr, you will. The pace that it’s currently growing is similar to (if not greater than) the type of growth that Twitter experienced 2 years ago. The blog/microblog/community hybrid social media site is well on its way to hitting the mainstream soon.
While its users and fans are often rabid, there is one entity that doesn’t give it much respect: Google. Search engines in general are frowning on ranking Tumblelogs well in their results pages because of Tumblr’s greatest strength: ease of content aggregation.
Simplicity, Thy Name is Tumblr
Anyone who has a Tumblr page can create 2 things extremely quickly: content and backlinks. One simply has to go through other Tumblr pages that the millions of users have created and click the “Reblog” button. They can add their own content to it in the form of notes, add tags, even adjust the URL. They also get a backlink from the source because whenever something is reblogged, a note with a link goes up at the source.
Assuming that most bypass the notes and tags, it is possible to place content on your Tumblelog and a backlink in approximately 4 seconds.
To put it into perspective, one of our clients currently runs 15 successful and content-rich Tumblelogs and spends less than 30 minutes a day keeping them maintained.
This simplicity is one of Tumblr’s greatest strengths, if not THE greatest, but…
… Google Doesn’t Like It
Anyone who optimizes sites for Google knows there are 2 things that hold the most value for rankings: content and backlinks.
Tumblelogs are set on subdomains of tumblr.com or on their own domains hosted by Tumblr. For most platforms, this is extremely useful in SEO as the search engines consider subdomains as their own unique website in many occasions. Blogger, a site that is owned by Google, has literally millions of subdomains that act as stand-alone websites where people can create theirblogname.blogspot.com and have that site rank well for their keywords.
Tumblr does not have that luxury. Somewhere along the lines, Google and the other search engines realized that it would be not only possible but encouraged by Tumblr and other people duplicate content and generate backlinks. As a result, it takes a lot more effort to get the search engines’ attention for stronger rankings.
Another factor that hurts Tumblr on the search engine is the lack of unique title tags for many of the pages. Those created as “Text” get the title of the story as the title tag, but pictures and videos share the same title tag as the homepage of their Tumblelog.
We are currently testing to see if this lack of respect from the search engines applies to outbound links. If the links are tainted in some way, Tumblr’s usefulness in optimizing other sites is also reduced compared to other platforms. We will see, as we have several test Tumblelogs running. When we know for sure, we’ll post the results here.
Does It Matter?
If you’re getting into Tumblr for SEO purposes to either achieve rankings directly or to use Tumblr as a linking tool, there are other similar free blogging and microblogging platforms that are superior.
If you’re getting into Tumblr because you want to share and find content, then Tumblr is ideal. The community aspect combined with the ease of use and maintenance make Tumblr a prime site through which to have fun, share, and network.
Does Tumblr matter? It all depends on how you want to use it.
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Read more about Tumblr on this Social Media Blog.
About JD Rucker
Thanks for the info, this made things much clearer for me. I was completely misinformed.
I think Tumblr has a lot of potential, just not sure anyones really using it to that potential right now.
Interesting post….I use both tumblr and blogspot for personal use and find that with very little SEO effort on my part, the blogspot outperforms my tumblr site.
I do agree that tumblr lacks uniqueness in terms of title tags and seems to be limited in other areas, but it’s still a great site to use.
I think after the penguin upgrade, tumblr is more useful for SEO than before
I have seen many high ranking websites that have tumblr in their top back links.
I knew as soon as I signed up to Tumblr it was too easy. But I’m hopeful that the quantity of backlinks will still add to the overall weight of inbound links to our site. They may not be heavily valued, but as long as they are counted in GWT then I think it is worth the time involved.
Hi I just want to ask for help! My tumblr blog has page duplicate title tags according to google webmasters. how do i fix this. i keep googling but find no relevant answer! help please!!!!! thanks so much
Tumblr blogs gain high Pagerank easily but as far as search engine rankings are concerned they are not as effective as a Blogger blog.
im hearing that tumblr is great for backlinks so im gonna give it a try and see what results i get. Nice post
Snapshot 2 years forward. Is it mainstream yet? Does it feel mainstream? It’s rather good. I use it as a shooting range for content creation. Simple and effective.
Obviously, you’ll be able to go to sites as You – Tube at which you might locate lots of funny vids. The line comes off the boat automatically once it hits a fish, which means that the user can catch a fish of virtually any size. Proffering multifarious benefits to the advertisers, it is a quintessential resort for companies big or small.
Tumblr is one of the best way to get backlink
Tumblr is the best way to get traffic.
Tumblr given me PR3 due to backlink
Tumblr is the high pr website network. So, backlink will be helpful.
Tumblr has increased so many visitors in short time of period.
I am waiting for my High PR backlink from Tumblr.
Tumblr is the biggest source of traffic for me.
Tumblr is the best!
I am supporting Tumblr blog to get High PR backlink
I used tumblr in past but did not like it much. But at that time i didn’t know that Google “don’t like” Tumblr. Thanks for this informative post
It’s an awesome post designed for all the internet visitors; they will take benefit from it I am sure.
Great post. I agree with you that tumblr doesn’t rank well in Google although sometimes I do notice some weird exceptions where it does rank well…
Interesting point of view regarding the poor SEO, i did suspect this.. but surely if the blog is ran correctly it could be used to generate powerful amounts of traffic and also used to leverage other personally host domain names.
This post is more or less 3 years old, hopefully googles attitude towards tarring Tumblr with the same brush has changed and it will let people who run their blog correctly to be ranked correctly..
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