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.
This post was written by...
JD Rucker – who has written 512 posts on Soshable | Social Media Blog. JD Rucker is a social media enthusiast who resides in Orange County, California. He works simultaneously for 2 companies - TK Carsites (an Automotive Internet Marketing Firm) and Hasai (a Social Media Strategy Firm). He writes for several publications including BusinessInsider, Fast Company, Techi, Top Cultured, and ICanHasInternets. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
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Thanks for putting all this information together. Would using Tumblr mean that Google would not pull up my blog content at all? Or is it just that the links would not prove beneficial?
Hmm, though I’m using tumblr with my own domain, it took only a few days for me to hit #2 on Google.
google can certainly add an exception for tumblr blogs in their algorithm if they wanted to.
their recent tweakings of the algorithm haven’t really been getting good feedback.. they should concetrate more on what people want i think.
Thanks for providing me this information.I will definitely take care about my blog not to pull up by google.
There are some SEO adjustments floating around for Tumblr that, in addition to best practices in the wording of your captions for non Text posts, seem to totally help in terms of rankings.
I don’t think anyone who uses Tumblr cares how they rank on Google. Content is designed for the dashboard more than for direct visitors to individual tumblelogs.
We’ve not used Tumblr ourselves, so haven’t heard anything of its SEO effect. To be honest I had personally assumed it would be mainly used by small time bloggers who aren’t fussed by their search rankings, mainly because those are the people I know who use it. I never realised Google might devalue it – I’ll have to look into this, thanks.
That was some really useful information. I do think that Tumblr is a lot more convenient and simple to use, but if it will hurt my brand’s SEO rankings, I will have to think twice about using it.
I found Tumblr’s community has an easier time “interacting” with my Tumblr blog through their “Love + Reblog” options and it’s nothing but a picture + snippet + redirect text post.
To say Tumblr is not SEO friendly is an understatement. I’ve run my Tumblr blog for almost 6-months now, posting several times per week (images, text, reblogs, lots of hyperlinks to outside sites, I follow others) —yet in the eyes of Google my Tumblr blog simply does not exist.
If I can’t find my own Tumblr blog though a basic Google search how would I find and share anyone else’s Tumblr posts?
You really have to sign-up and become part of the Tumblr community in order to easily find other Tumblelogs —in this sense, Tumblr is like a closed digital gated community —but welcomes all with open arms.
There are some SEO adjustments floating around for Tumblr that, in addition to best practices in the wording of your captions for non Text posts, seem to totally help in terms of rankings.
Thank you for your answer. I have been asking why after many post my tumblr blogs do not rank well in Google although I felt that I have superior articles there than any other blogs I wrote somewhere else. I simply love the look and simplicity. But I do not reblog.
But I do not see any of my tumblr blogs in any top20. Now, I understand.
Thank you.
I would like to know what microblogging sites you believe are best for SEO purposes. I was a big believer in Utterli until the site shut down. I was able to get indexed by google and land on page 1 for many keywords within as little as 2 hours on Utterli. I’m searching for a replacement now.
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I’m with ya on this one. I agree completely, great post.
I do however find it to be a great source for backlinks! I think it’s used best when sharing information, storing cool stuff for yourself and others, and linking to a blog post or website with any anchor text of your choosing. Sure, there are superior sites out there for that, but Tumblr does the job too! Great post, I’m with it.
Thanks a lot for a great review and valuable conclusions.my take is that tumblr is still a good tool for SEO purposes, it just shouldn’t be the only tool in your arsenal. Platforms like posterous can be a good substitute for easy publishing too. I’d love to see a review of this one as it relates to seo. Thanks again!
It’s all about the purpose of the blog, I use tumblr for posting sneakers news and it works great but I feeling that one day I will have to switch I want my website to be more serious.
I’ve got in top 10 in Google with a keyword (title of my tbumlr blog) within a month.
There goes my evil plan to exploit Tumblr.
thanks for sharing info.. google need approve tumlr
Brilliant post. I wish I saw this before I moved my design photo blog to Tumblr from Wordpress. I always wondered how to work out the SEO part so this really helps.
I was using Tumblr to building back links to http://www.TruckerDeluxe.com – great post by the way, very helpful.
Lately I have been using tumbler solely for backlink building for My Golfing Hints and Tips Website , takes a matter of seconds and each backlink is DOFOLLOW with numerous links ranging from PR 0 – 6, this can instantly add alot of value to any website on the next google update, thanks tumblr
I have used Wordpress a lot and they have a ton of plugins. I always felt like I was doing something to help my SEO with Wordpress. Since I started using Tumblr I haven’t done anything and have had great results. My question is how does the “reblog” affect SEO with Google? Does it look at it as duplicate content or has Tumblr done it right by have a “source” backlink to my original content.
thanks,
Craig
Thank you very much for sharing the information. I saw a few thumblr blogs with high PR and wondered where they got this.
I have created a tumblr blog and submit sitemap to Google Webmaster tool. I realized that google doesnt care about sitemap and it is not even downloaded by Google yet. Normally my other websites’ sitemaps are downloaded within a minute. I am not so sure what is the problem but I have huge doubts about using tumblr as microblogging service.
Also it is obvious that tumblr doesnt support block type modules – blogspot implementation is extremely useful- and it is a pain to optimize theme in terms of ads and other stuff. You supposed to choose theme carefully and you have to know about html and creepy tumblr style markup.
Hi I am using Tumblr to blog and connect it to to my site.
I am disappointed that google do not find the text in my blog /tumblr.
I would like to ha a link from the blog to for example:
http://feedbackakademin.se/Gestalt-definition-teori.html
Do you have any suggestion for tool? Wordpress? posterous?
Regards
Stefan
I think “SOME” not all of your commentors above are not understanding that when you post your blog on TUMBLR, any of the words on your blog, keywords or information will not be spidered right as it should. If a person wrote about Kittens in my blue bathroom and I typed it for a search on Google, I would show up unless you do some manipulation coding.
As for some other blog web sites out there like Wordpress, I would do a search on Kittens in my blue bathroom on Google and it would be on the listing right away.
Ive done some tests on some of my friend’s blogs and the only thing would show up for TUMBLR on a search engine is their subdomain site. Of course Tumblr shows up on Google if I typed out the username of the subdomain off of Tumblr.
I’ve been finding some high PR indexed pages on tumblr, lots of them. It’s incredibly easy to get links from them by simply clicking the heart at the top of the blog. It’s tumblr’s version of Facebook “likes”.
I created a wordpress blog to the point of making it look nice with a couple of posts to get started… i go back to work on it a month later and it’s been hacked. I lost everything, i couldn’t even log-in to delete the hackers work. Not a lot of work went into it but i lost my content and i’ve heard this is common with wordpress. I would hate to get a year or 100 posts in and have to start over again so that’s my reason for the switch.
I’m experimenting with tumblr for a few weeks now and it’s interesting but it does feel like a “gated community” as Darryl Jonckheere suggested above. I also feel the pages are very picture driven and when someone reblogs a picture i’ve posted from my website, tumblr will link to the my page but it saves my picture to it’s own URL at (http://s3.amazonaws.com) as opposed to my website where the picture exists, that really bugs me.
I’m open to going back to wordpress but i’ll need to research how to back everything up and prevent getting hacked again…
Nothing is better than self-hosted site. You own the full-power on your blog and Google loved it. Don’t ever trust free-hosted platform because they can banned you easily when you get popularity among other sites
I luv Tumblr because they have simple platform
Amazing post! Basically Tumblr has their own fans who don’t care about getting indexing by SE. But for me it’s important for SE visit and index our blog. For me, I love Blogger or Wordpress than Tumblr. I hope Tumblr will fix their system and become most popular blog site.
Thanks for the honest insight. Lately using Tumblr to get quick and easy backlinks to rank highly in Google seems very fashionable but clearly there are downsides and Google will or already has cracked down on such techniques. Useful as part of a SEO campaign I guess but better to ensure your tumblr blog has some actual content.
This underlines the power of Google… And I will bow down to it
Hi, Thanks for awesome post on Tumblr. Before this I want to host my blog on tumblr but after reading this article it’s not good micro-blogging platform if you want to get advantage of Google
Extremely well written, I had a feeling tumbler was too easy for seo, makes sense google would not give it high value.
Interesting… I have read several posts saying that Google loves Tumblr and many people swear by it in SEO terms ?!
Thank you for this interesting article on Tumblr!
“We are currently testing to see if this lack of respect from the search engines applies to outbound links.”
Have you ever come to conclusive results with your tests? I would be interested to know more.
Good article. But does anyone really know for sure how the google algorithm works. Outside Google that is
I’ve just spent 10 minutes creating a couple of blog pages to try and draw some traffic from a couple of low volume furniture related keywords.. It will be interesting to see if the blogs get crawled pretty quickly and if it has any impact on our SERP’s.
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