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
-
Why my website internal links on moz is 0?
My Web site: https://www.basictrailers.com.au/ I have been using Moz for almost 3 months, from the start to now, the internal links are always 0. However, if I check the links on my Google Search Console, it is over 1500. So what is the problem? If Moz is trying to make its algorithm similar to Google, why that they even cannot find my internal links. That is ridiculous. 0fhTnQG
Moz Pro | | Lilycharlie2 -
A competitor's SEO firm is building spammy links to my website.
A competitor's SEO firm is building spammy links to my website. I know the disavow link process, but even this can be time consuming. Is there a better way to protect my website? Any and all ideas appreciated.... Are there any cool Moz tools that can help me manage this assault? Sorry, just a follow up from me... It appears that many of the spammy links (referrals) I see in Google Analytics are not present in Google WebMaster Tools. Does this mean that the spammy ones that I'm concerned about have already been discounted by Google, or are the spammy links no-follow? Any input on this would also be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | BVREID0 -
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 -
Open Site Explorer and link numbers
I know this question has been asked many times in this forum but I still can't work it out. Why does this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 Which is showing all links, external, to pages "on this sub domain" show 1,935 external links but this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 which is exactly the same but this time shoing followed + 301 links, says "showing 1 - 50 external links) but won't show the total links (and I know the mouse-over on the question mark says it's won't show the total links, but I don't understand why it can't show the total links when it could show the total links when I requested to see "all links" instead of just "followed+301" links.) but it actually lists 700 links (14 pages, 50 results each page). I know the link list is limited to 25 links per domain but then it means you can NEVER know the total link count unless you download the full report. This makes using OSE to know numbers of links (internal, external, or otherwise) impossible. And if anyone uses the API, why the API (external+follow) returns 1,451 links? I'm sure it's an ongoing issue with people trying to get their head around all of this and I've never really been able to. Any insight would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | eatyourveggies0 -
Find pages containing broken links.
hi everyone, for each internal broken links I need to find all the pages that contain it. In the Seomoz report there is only a refferer link for each broken link, but google webmaster tools indicates that the dead link is present in many pages of the site. there is a way to have these data with SEOmoz or other software, in a csv report ? thanks
Moz Pro | | wwmind0 -
How often does the competitive link checker get updated?
I just found a link in the competitive link checker that links to a couple of my competitors. The checker says that i do not have a link on that page, but there is one.. i recently (last week) obtained that link. So that raises the question: how many times is the competitive link checker updated? kind regards
Moz Pro | | JarnoNijzing0 -
External Links through Open site explorer
I have just ran an Open site explorer query on our site due to having one of a constant ranking keywords drop, and found that we have 48 new links appear on the report under the anchor text 'home' These are not normal links, and I cannot see where or how these have been connected to our site for example: <colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | hickboy5
| http://regvac.com/TrIsland.swb <colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
| http://meteonorm.com/fileadmin/tmy3/722066ndry3.rdm | <colgroup span="1"><col span="1" width="696"></colgroup>
| http://www.sexintheshower.net/downloads/SS960-12-pack.psd?ActDo=ShowArt&Information_ID=2396&Parent_ID=&type=&Langue_ID=An&rubID=3068473 | My question is how and why are these appearing on the seomoz open site explorer report? What are they? How can I get them removed, and let google know this was nothing to do with us? Thanks S |0 -
Toolset Q.) Re. Linkscape - How is the External Links (link juice) calculated in the API?
Re. External Links (link-juice) - I really need to know what this reflects.Ie. linkdiagnosis.com divides the PR by external link factors to get an idea of link juice or power - how does Moz calculate this scoring?
Moz Pro | | Turkey0