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
-
Links>TopPages: Mostly image URLs: Good for SEO? Redirect obsolete ones??
Looking at my "Links > Top Pages" report shows the top fifteen being image URLs (jpg files). Weird or normal? Clicking the "View Links" icon for a few of the image URL's shows that the best links in the list have DA in the 30's and 40's, and some PA in the 20's. But the linking sites have names that SOUND pretty crappy (from sites with names that sound weird or spammy) QUESTION 1: Do links to image URLs... A) help the overall SEO of the site's HTML pages, B) only help the specific page the image appears on, C) or are they of no value to the regular pages? QUESTION 2: What to do with the obsolete images? (images still hosted on our site, but do not appear on any pages) If I remove the images, the links will be lost. Which is good if the links are hurting us, but it would be bad for our SEO if the links are helping (unless we 301 the obsolete images to current ones) Thanks!
Moz Pro | | GregB1230 -
Whether or not to remove a link from a website with high spam score on Open Site Explorer
Hello Moz! I just subscribed for your Moz Pro program. Amazing stuff! On open site explorer, I found a number of links to my site from a page called with a very high page authority and high domain authority, but also a high spam score (8 or 9, one with a 10). I say multiple spam scores, because it's strange, there are what appears variations of the same url, and each one is considered a link. For instance, there's an abc.linkstomysite.com and xyz.linktomysite.com, and 123.linktomysite.com... there are about 15 of these (all with the spam scores mentioned above)! This must have been some old SEO work done I payed for back in the prehistoric SEO days. However, my fear is the following: Removing these links, and then losing some potentially strong link juice. I don't have many high DA or PA links to my site, and these are some major ones. The domain in question "linktomysite.com", when entered into OSE, only has a spam score of 4, and it has a domain authority of 45 and page authority of 37. My site has a spam score of 2 and no messages from google regarding a penalty, but an overall reduction in google traffic over the years (just keeps slowly dropping... as if a weight is pulling me down?) What do you think, should I leave, or remove? The linkstomysite page is just a LONG page full of links, with short descriptions, nothing of value, but with a an old domain age (relatively). Most important for me is keeping at least some ranking/visibility, while I personally work on building quality links and helpful content. thanks!
Moz Pro | | DavidC.0 -
Why did my DA and Links go down?
How could I begin to research this to find out why we have less total links and a lower domain authority. Our DA has gone down two points and our total links dropped by a few thousand. I'd like to find out why that happened but I'm just not sure where to start. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Sika220 -
If links have been disavowed, do they still show in crawl reports?
I have a new client who says they have disavowed all their bad links, but I still see a bunch of spammy backlinks in my external links report. I understand that disavow does not mean links are actually removed so will they continue to show in Google Webmaster Tools and in my Moz reports? If so, how do I know which ones have been disavowed and which have not? Regards, Dino
Moz Pro | | Dino640 -
Advanced Link Report Different Link # than Total Links??
Hi, I've downloaded a csv report for links in "advanced reports" section. At the very top in blue OSE lists overall metrics, i.e. Domain Auth, Page Auth, Linking Root Domains, and then it lists "Total Links" at 1,769. When I download the advanced report in csv I have 505 total links in Excel. Why is there a difference between Total Links and what I have downloaded? What makes up the Total Links? The report I created included, "inbound links/linking pages, Types of Links: any; Links that come from: Any Page, Any IP; Links that link to: any page on subdomain; links with properties: any; Thanks!
Moz Pro | | toby-020 -
Does Google have a direct link with facebook and twitter?
Google monitor social media. What I'm wondering is do Google use the same tools we have on Facebook's API, Twitter's API etc to use in their SERPs Or do Facebook grant Google more detailed access to see who has liked links etc. I think it's quite an interesting point as surely I can push up my own count by repeatedly sharing my own links, which wouldn't be genuine. If Google had better access they could then determine what's been faked etc.
Moz Pro | | PhotoGazza0 -
Greater Number of Linking Domains in Anchor Text Excel Export?
I exported the anchor text for a domain from Opensite Explorer and when I sum the "Number of Linking Root Domains Containing Anchor Text" it is higher than the total amount of linking root domains for the site. Is this because some domains use multiple anchor text links, so it is counted more than once in the exported spreadsheet?
Moz Pro | | ProjectLabs0 -
Non-Recognition of Links
Hi All, I asked about a client last month and have had to do some other digging to try to find out what's going on with its Google rankings. According to our link-building spreadsheet, we have got up to 50 links (from 50 domains) in process of being actioned and a large proportion of these are actually in existence. There are two questions:- 1. Open Site Explorer only recognises 3 domains - as I know that other domains exist and are pointing (mostly 'followed'), what can be the reason OSE doesn't recognise this? 2. What can be done to encourage these external links to be more easily accessible by OSE and, presumably other bots? Other Points:- 1. I initially thought it might be crawl blocking issue causing the rankings, but Bing/Yahoo rankings are slowly dragging themselves upwards. 2. Robots.txt is not blocking any of the site 3. Pro on-site analysis for the target keyword is 'A' 4. The website's stats per OSE are better than some competitors in the top 20 except on the root domain issue, which is why the above point is important. Link building for other clients has worked really well without hiccups and with general gradual recognition, so any tips from more experienced folks out there would be gratefully appreciated. Many thanks, Martin
Moz Pro | | Nobody15609869897230