Links from tumblr

[team74]

I have two links from hosted tumblr blogs which are not on tumblr.com.

So, website1 has a tumblr blog: tumblr.website1.com

And another site website2.com also uses the a record/custom domains option from tumblr but not on a subdomain, which is decribed below:

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains

Does this mean that all links from such sites count as coming from the same IP in google's eyes? Or is there value in getting links from multiple sites because the a-record doesn't affect SEO in a negative way?

Many thanks,

Mike.

[dittoeffect]

I am a huge fan of building links with tumblr. On webmaster tools, when the domain linking to me is not a tumblr subdomain but is using the tumblr platform, it says these are unique domains and easily puts my site well into the hundreds of different domains linking to it.

While I do agree that linking with the same anchor text may have diminishing return you are still receiving page rank and giving the google robots more opportunities to crawl to your site which ultimately still holds a great amount of value regardless of how google sees their ip. It is a myth that google even considers the same IP to be a negative feature. Google sees each page as a unique site (even within the same domain and same IP). If that site is reputable then it can pass on good value and if it is not then it doesnt. So often when people have many sites on the same IP they are not skilled at making them authoritative and thus assume that more sites from the same IP or more links from teh same IP can't add much value which is really not the case.

Hope this helps

[team74]

Thanks WIlliam, I appreciate your help!

[WilliamBay]

Hi Mike,

I see. So theoretically speaking someone creates 10 different Tumbler accounts. Each with a unique domain (using the Tumbler unique domain method).

Yes, each one will be a completely different domain, but, also, they will more than likely be of the same 1 C-Block or maybe even the same 1 IP (not sure how Tumbler handles their subdomain IP structure). Since they are all hosted through Tumbler on their servers.

It's not the end of the world, but it's also not the link diversity that you thought you might get. Many people have Tumbler accounts and I don't think Google will treat each one as if it was owned by the same person.
That being said, if each of your Tumbler accounts use the same Anchor Text, or share similarities in other aspects (linking to other similar sites, being mostly linky over providing quality content, similar usernames, etc.) Google will more than likely be able to sniff that out and not see those as valuable links.

From a link building perspective it seems that there are better methods. In this hypothetical case, you'll have to remember that there are now 10 micro-sites that you have to generate some value to by building links to and content on for there to even be a little bit of juice to pass along to the site you really want to rank...
Quite a lot of hustle for a little bit of payoff.

[team74]

Hi William, thank you for that. I still was in the dark about this.

Your answer seems to be more from a stand point of the effects of me owning such pages.

So, forgive me if I've misunderstood, but what about from a link building point of view?

If 10 business use tumblr blogs as their websites, it looks like they use the same IP even though they are on different domains. This is because they change their Arecords.

So, If I get one link from each website, does it count as 10 links from 10 IPs/domains, or 10 links from just one domain? I just want to know how Google would count a-records, because is it redirection, or actually a static thing?

I hope I'm making sense, and your answer will affect my link building efforts.

[WilliamBay]

Hi Mike,

I know you asked this a few weeks ago, and you may have already found your answer.

But to answer this, no. Tumbler essentially is just redirecting your A-Record domain to a sub-domain and giving it a nice url.

So what happens is the url website2.com (from your example above) is staring from zero. It also means that if you develop some quality trust and authority on that particular domain, you won't be able to take it with you if you want to use that domain for a site.

The url is essentially invisible, so whatever links you're sending isn't really to  website2.com, but to tumbler.website2.com.

Unless Tumbler offers a 301 redirect option when you want your domain back, the domain website2.com will have no value to it.

I hope that answers your question.