Tumblr and Link Equity

[BartonInteractive]

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

[julie-getonthemap]

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.

[BartonInteractive]

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

[BartonInteractive]

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

[NickW816]

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.

[BartonInteractive]

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,
Zack

4-27-17-high-da.PNG 4-27-17-ordinary-link.PNG 4-27-17-report-with-no-tumblr-found.PNG

[BartonInteractive]

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.

[NickW816]

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.

[BartonInteractive]

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.

[BartonInteractive]

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

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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