Why I’m kissing Tumblr a sad, sad good-bye
My company has a lot of blogs for the various businesses that I’m starting - 52 to be exact. Most of them are run on Wordpress, which I really like, one is run on an old install of TypePad (which is clunky, but might be because I need to update), and one is run on Tumblr.
I love Tumblr. I love the user interface, the way that you can post quick snippets of things. Quotes, pictures, text, links…it is fun to use. And the templates are awesome. The Cara Austin blog is on Tumblr, and it’s a delight to update every day.
But there is a fundamental problem with Tumblr that I wasn’t aware of before I started using it - the search engines don’t seem to like it. In the two months since I have been posting (every weekday starting March 13, 123 posts total), the blog has only received 17 visitors from Google. Every one of those visits, except one, had the term “Cara Austin blog” or “Cara Austin Tumblr” as the search term.
This is a major problem for a commercial blog. I have a personal Tumblr that I use for my own things, notes, things I want to remember - and I don’t care if no one ever comes to that site. But for Cara Austin, a musician who needs to get her name out there and needs to sell albums, this is a big issue.
I didn’t know this about Tumblr. I didn’t know that the pages wouldn’t be indexed well (or show up high) on Google. I knew that Tumblr doesn’t have comments. And I knew that Tumblr didn’t have a search engine built in. These things I decided to live with.
But I didn’t know that Tumblr had a search engine optimization (SEO) problem.
I could no longer ignore the fact after I launched another new blog on Wordpress on April 23, put up a few posts, and that blog starting receiving more traffic, from a wider variety of search terms, in a much shorter time period.
Here’s a little chart to illustrate:
And so I’m leaving Tumblr. I’m leaving with a tear in my eye, but I’m leaving nonetheless.
Tags: Blogging, Cara Austin, Google, Pure Incubation, SEO, traffic, Tumblr, TypePad, WordPress
May 20th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Totally agree. I think it has a lot to do with the lack of titles on all posts except texts. I’m excited that version 2.6 of Wordpress will have a bookmarklet that will make it easy to post content to WP like it is to post to Tumblr.
However, you can’t help but root for Tumblr and it’s sad to see it’s not really getting any better when it comes to Search Engines indexing the content.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
You could always use a tumblelog theme for Wordpress like:
http://livetardy.com/t1/
in combination with the Quick Post plug in for Wordpress to emulate the Tumblr bookmarklet.
There are other tumblelog themes for wordpress out there also.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I found a link describing a very tumblr-looking lifestream called Sweetchron.. you can read the article here.
I have no idea what its SEO potential is, and you can probably beat WP into a Tumblr-style clone pretty easily, but I thought I’d put it out there.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
There is some discussion on this post happening over on FriendFeed. Follow this link.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Also, thanks for the input and suggestions about “tumblr-looking” clones…that is probably the direction I’ll head with the blog. I’ll keep you posted, though! Melissa
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Hi Melissa, I work with the Movable Type and TypePad teams, and I think one of those platforms might well be your best choice. Both allow you to run multiple blogs all in one install, and both have significantly better security than other platforms, so you don’t have to worry about your blog getting hacked or constantly having to update your software.
But perhaps the best reason to take a look is because of how strong the SEO is on TypePad — we’ve had our customers’ own research show that TypePad blogs show up even ahead of Blogger sites, which are hosted by Google itself. (Take a look: http://twitter.com/simplyneecy/statuses/766451463 ) What’s cool is, you can use things like our Blog It service (http://blogit.typepad.com/) for free to post across Tumblr and TypePad or MT at the same time.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I use Tumblr as a middle-man between the micro-blogging on Jaiku and Twitter and the blogs (where I love WP too). Tumblr is perfect as some sort of notebook but I wouldn’t use it as the only way to communicate my personal brand.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:55 pm
@Anil (Dash): you if someone should at this time of the life of web 2.0 know that it is important to read the whole post before trying to pitch your product? “one is run on an old install of TypePad (which is clunky, but might be because I need to update)”
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:01 pm
@deeped I think your description of Tumblr as being “perfect as some sort of notebook” is right on. That’s why I’ll keep using my personal Tumblog, alongside this blog…because it is like a scrapbook for all my thoughts about things on the Web. - Melissa
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:40 pm
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May 23rd, 2008 at 9:29 am
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June 3rd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
interesting review. Its kind of sad how quickly the wordpress blog beat it out.
August 12th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
[…] This is the post that I made on this topic on my 16th Letter blog. […]
August 27th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
I love tumblr, I never knew I will leave other FULL blogging services (wordpress, blogger, typepad) for this young service when I first registered in it.. And for the urls, tumblr now extracts them from the post titles, and tags are being enhanced too. You can still use it for micro blogging and aggregator to websites you like..
September 26th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
[…] in the process of moving Cara’s blog to a new platform. (If you want to read more about it, this link will tell you the full story.) Soon all the links to the blog will point to the new blog, but we’re still in the process […]
December 14th, 2008 at 9:02 am
[…] excusable: extremely poor search engine performance. This issue was brought up a few months ago by Melissa Chang, a flurry of discussion ensued, and Tumblr made some changes (Erik Dafforn posted a more complete […]
January 5th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Google loves Textpattern. I haven’t done it yet with mine, but there’s a way to integrate Tumblr posts right into Textpattern..
February 3rd, 2009 at 11:57 pm
You actually can integrate comments into Tumblr using Disqus. With the official inauguration blog recently being run through Tumblr…I think there’s hope for it yet (at least, I hope so…it’s my publishing platform of choice!) I also hear a lot of rumblings in terms of development, third party widgets, etc.
February 6th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I totally agree with this. I’m trying to figure out what blogging software to use, and its visibility to google is important to me. Taking a known tumblr blog, I tried searching what the Title of the blog is, AND direct quotes from the blog’s content. Didn’t come up in the first 5 search results pages!