Tumblr and Link Equity
-
Hi Moz Community,
I've recently decided to start a project where I gather 1,000 great examples of something that's searched for often, and am thinking that posting it to a Tumblr site like the following website did could be a great way to pass link equity back to my main site (with a little "site by [my site]" somewhere in the header or footer).
While I was super pumped about this idea today, and have now gathered almost 500 of my examples (mentioned above), I am not seeing link equity passed from this site, even on the non-redirected links here:
http://gothamlogos.tumblr.com/
Anyone have any experience with projects like this? I've checked read the Moz Tumblr and SEO article from a few years ago, which makes it seem like this should be an SEO "win"... But using the Moz Pro account tools, I'm not seeing any of these non-redirect links (ordinary links) giving any value to anyone on this example site.
Thanks so much in advance,
Zack
-
I have a ton of Tumblr blogs but their links don't show in any of the tools. I'm hoping that the footer and header links count for something, and that Moz and the other tools just don't spider them because in general it's not worth it.
One of my tumblr blogs has a page authority of 39, so it's nice to think of that juice floating around my web properties, but I may be wishful thinking.
-
Note: I marked your response as "Good Answer" (as I thought it was a good answer), but did not intend for this post to show as "Answered" now. Is there any way to undo that? Fearing I may now lose out on anyone cruising through but ignoring "Answered" posts.
Best,
Zack
-
Hi Nicholas,
Thanks so much for the thorough explanation and sharing of your experience here. While it doesn't quite leave me feeling satisfied regarding one or two of the questions brought up, it is incredibly helpful and very insightful.
Like you, I'll also keep an eye out for a response from Takeshi Young or a Mozzer to see if any more can be clarified here. If not, I may just end up going for a simple WordPress site here instead.
Thanks again!
Zack
-
Zack, thank you for sending the screenshots and providing additional information. The MozBar is showing a domain authority of 98 because it is still part of tumblr.com, which all sites on tumblr will also have. The snipet of code is linking to an image (which appears to be broken or not loading for some reason). You can see this from the "https://seo-kansas-city.tumblr.com/, and the code looks similar for the links on the image posts. (not showing "nofollow" or Javascript redirect).
These links are not showing up in my Moz Pro campaign tracking or Open Site Explorer either, but that does not mean they are not being seen or giving any value to Google. If you ran a backlink analysis through Ahrefs, Open Site Explorer, Majestic and SEMrush, you will usually get 4 different numbers for both total backlinks and linking domains unfortunately.
What I came to the conclusion of for myself as an answer is that this can have SEO value through images with links, but it will not be a silver bullet. I am also yet to see a Tumblr domain link show up from any of the backlink analysis tools I mentioned, although the coding looks like it is "dofollow". I would love for Takeshi Young or a Mozzer to jump in on this if possible.
-
To expand on this issue, I'll include a few screen grabs taken just now.
One shows the very high domain authority from the example Tumblr site I referenced. (http://gothamlogos.tumblr.com/)
The other shows the snippet of code that links (outside of posts and image posts) to the sponsor site (http://underconsideration.com/), which -doesn't- have a "Tumblr redirect", and -doesn't- have a nofollow.
With these two screen shots, I became pretty excited at the thought of doing something very similar. However, heading into our Moz Prop account, I'm not seeing this Tumblr site passing any link juice to the sponsor site. (In fact, it's nowhere to be found at all in the Moz Pro reporting. See attached "Inbound Link Report" for underconsideration.com.)
Still holding out for anyone with this experience with this specific scenario before I mark this as "answered".
Greatly appreciated,
Zack4-27-17-high-da.PNG 4-27-17-ordinary-link.PNG 4-27-17-report-with-no-tumblr-found.PNG
-
Very thorough response, Nicholas. Thanks so much for the effort. Going to take a couple screen shots and elaborate in a new non-"post response" comment.
-
Hi Zack, great question, I was actually looking into the relevancy and usefulness of Tumblr a couple months ago myself to see if it still had any benefit SEO wise. The links in tumblr posts are no-follow to my understanding, with the exception of "image posts" that have a link embedded in the image, which Takeshi Young explained in a comment response on his "How To Use Tumblr for SEO and Social Media Marketing" article originally posted in 2013. His comment response was from 2016 which makes me think links within the image of "image posts" on a tumblr blog are still do-follow and have link value.
With all that being said, I do agree with Andy that their are probably better ways to gain links and increase your SEO efforts. If you do give tumblr a try, make each post unique and helpful, and use image posts with relevant links embedded in them.
Here is The Moz Blog Post I referenced: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-use-tumblr-for-seo-and-social-media-marketing. See Enrique Ruiz Prieto comment on this post for the context I referenced about Tumblr image post links.
-
While Andy's response was helpful, I'm still hoping to hear from a couple people with specific experience in regards to using Tumblr for linkbuilding (good or bad). Keeping this question marked "unanswered" till then.
-
Thanks for the response, Andy. Since I've already put in some hours on this one (and since it obviously isn't "black hat"), I'll likely still go forward with the idea as an experiment somehow.
However, whether or not it's best to use Tumblr is something I'm still on the fence on. (The benefit would be being able to pass the project to a junior developer on our team to knock out.) But if a Tumblr microsite isn't the best in terms of linkbuilding as it was just a couple years ago, perhaps just a standalone WordPress site would be better for a project like this.
Thanks again,
Zack
-
Hi Zack,
If this was something that was a winner, I think a lot more would be doing it - I can't see that this could be a link building strategy but you might get something back in terms of traffic to your site.
Header and footer links are largely ignored by Google and you really could do with any links being something targeted within the body text of a page.
There are much better ways to gain links but link building is one of the trickier areas of SEO. This just doesn't appear in any of the good texts about building links.
-Andy
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate content issues with file download links (diff. versions of a downloadable application)
I'm a little unsure how canonicalisation works with this case. 🙂 We have very regular updates to the application which is available as a download on our site. Obviously, with every update the version number of the file being downloaded changes; and along with it, the URL parameter included when people click the 'Download' button on our site. e.g. mysite.com/download/download.php?f=myapp.1.0.1.exe mysite.com/download/download.php?f=myapp.1.0.2.exe mysite.com/download/download.php?f=myapp.1.0.3.exe, etc In the Moz Site Crawl report all of these links are registering as Duplicate Content. There's no content per se on these pages, all they do is trigger a download of the specified file from our servers. Two questions: Are these links actually hurting our ranking/authority/etc? Would adding a canonical tag to the head of mysite.com/download/download.php solve the crawl issues? Would this catch all of the download.php URLs? i.e. Thanks! Jon
Moz Pro | | jonmc
(not super up on php, btw. So if I'm saying something completely bogus here...be kind 😉 )0 -
Inbound link cleanup and management
Hey guys this is my first time asking a question here but I have been lurking for a while now and have learned a lot here. I have to come up with a plan to go through, analyze, and clean up the existing backlinks for 37 root domains. That to me makes manually looking through the stack one at a time impossible. Obviously there are some great tools and I currently have Moz tools and Raven available to me but am open to acquire something different as well if it makes sense. My questions are: 1. Do I need to worry about nofollow links at all? Should I just separate them out right off the top and be done with that? 2. What ways have you all accomplished this task? Are there any time sucking pitfalls to avoid? Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance this site truly has been a blessing to me!
Moz Pro | | RossM0 -
New to Moz, need some probably basic answers about Keywords, Linking, Competitors and General SEO
Hi, So I have quite a lot of data colelcted about my site now, regarding keyword research, page crawling and competitor research ect. But I find myself second guessing myself about what I have done and what to do next. I have done basic research for as many relevant keywords I could think of to my site, including branded and non branded terms. If the main competitive keywords for my niche are very competitive, shall I start doing more research for long tail keywords and only try to rank for them? Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? How do I best use the data collected through Moz? Good practices? Techniques? Tips and Tricks? What is the best practice for finding potential link partners and asking them for mutual linking? Techniques for finding partners that are likely to link with us, but still provides link juice. I must apologise for this long-winded set of questions, but these are troubling me! Any help would be greatly appreciated, Kind regards, Max Johnson
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
Links don't add up
Sorry if this is obvious, but I'm new to seomoz. I've run an analysis for one of my pages and it's showing 624 total links - 118 internal and 6 external. Why doesn't the sum of the internal and external links equal the total links?
Moz Pro | | landmark10 -
Are organic site links excluded in the rankings report?
If I'm pulling a rankings report for a specific subdomain and a different subdomain appears at the main result and the specific subdomain is a site link beneath it, does that show up in the results? It doesn't seem to in my report.
Moz Pro | | mattiasantin0 -
Linking Building: Do I have to beat Linking Root Domains or Total Links?
Hello, When skoping for how to beat competitors, do I need to aim to beat the linking root domains number or the total links? Or do I need to think about both? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
How long before new links show up in OSE?
Hi - How long should it be before a brand new external link to our site shows up in OSE?
Moz Pro | | tcolling0 -
How can a competitor show no internal links?
I'm comparing metrics between my site and competitors. Statistics on Site Explorer show that one competitor has no internal links. How is that possible? http://screencast.com/t/P9WX7R9hpdD Thanks for your insight. P9WX7R9hpdD
Moz Pro | | addventures0