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
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.
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.
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.
There is some discussion on this post happening over on FriendFeed. Follow this link.
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
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.
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.
@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)”
@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
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interesting review. Its kind of sad how quickly the wordpress blog beat it out.
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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..
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Google loves Textpattern. I haven’t done it yet with mine, but there’s a way to integrate Tumblr posts right into Textpattern..
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.
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!
They have to know that this is an issue. I’m thinking that if they already haven’t addressed this, they will in the near future. Facebook has done with with the Fan pages.
I can’t say for sure, but I think many tumblrs actually like this. In my experience, tumblr is about promoting community, and this inherently contradicts the potential for a “commercial blog.” So I think you are right to switch it up as tumblr is not, nor will it ever be, the place to be if you are looking to attract traffic.
Question now is that will people who use it continue to use it when it has a problem with search engines.
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This post made me sad
I have noticed these problems but I thought that was my fault in some way… but it’s not. I love tumblr, It’s like a second home.. a secret one.
But as one can not build anything comercial on a “secret” blog, we must leave.
One day I have inserted a Google Custom Search engine on a tumblr blog, not even 1 result for any search query – that’s just wrong.
Anyways, we still have other options