Being Geek Chic is the yammerings of a Midwestern nerd named Elizabeth Giorgi. My vision impairment is real, which is frustrating because I really would like to see a 3D movie.
Send questions, requests and ideas to [email protected]. Please put your complaints on a napkin and toss it.
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Note
11th January 2012
Can we solve the Tumblr SEO problem?
Have you ever Googled “Being Geek Chic”? You probably didn’t find this blog. Why? Well, I’ve been trying to figure out that very thing for weeks. If you really want to chuckle, try “beinggeekchic.com” and discover that the blog still doesn’t come up first, but my Google Webmaster message boards post I wrote about my problem does.You see, I host this blog on Tumblr. I do, despite the fact that I’ve read here and here and here and here about the problems that Tumblr has with SEO. I looked at the data and tried to accept the fact that only .5% of my traffic was coming from search results, but the truth is that it’s making crazy. When you put this much effort into sometime, you really want people to find it.
Here’s a sampling of things I’ve done in the last few weeks that have allowed me to see a minor improvement in the number of BGC related posts that appear on search results:
1. Registered my domain with Google Webmaster tools
2. Changed my structure of my post titles to always be tagged <h1> or <h2>
3. Started using ALT text on all images and descriptions for all links
In the last couple week’s I’ve tried all these things and more to attempt to fix the issue. You can read the aforementioned Google Webmaster post to see more details on the changes I’ve made. However, despite all these things, weeks later, you’ll still find the following things if you googled this blog:
- A blogger account that hasn’t been updated since January 2010 that mentions geek chic fashion
- Another geek blog, So Geek Chic, mentioning a post from this site (they use tumblr’s Redux template, which perhaps has been developed by someone with better SEO savvy or the ladies at SGC have done something else that has improved their results)
- The definition of “Geek” on Wikipedia
The thing is: It shouldn’t be this hard. Some of the talking heads at Tumblr have said that the issue lies in the owners of the blog not doing the legwork. Message boards are littered with arguments about whether or not the structure of the reblog is the core of the problem. I’ve even read in many a comment section that Google has purposely attempted to squander Tumblr’s success to improve adoption rates of Blogger.
To test out that theory, I created two posts on Blogger and Wordpress with some key elements. Both contain Being Geek Chic in the title, the body and the URL. However, two weeks later, these two posts don’t rank at all. Good luck even finding them. I think we can rule that theory out. Here’s what the folks at Soshable think:
Tumblelogs are set on subdomains of tumblr.com or on their own domains hosted by Tumblr. For most platforms, this is extremely useful in SEO as the search engines consider subdomains as their own unique website in many occasions. Blogger, a site that is owned by Google, has literally millions of subdomains that act as stand-alone websites where people can create theirblogname.blogspot.com and have that site rank well for their keywords.
Tumblr does not have that luxury. Somewhere along the lines, Google and the other search engines realized that it would be not only possible but encouraged by Tumblr and other people duplicate content and generate backlinks. As a result, it takes a lot more effort to get the search engines’ attention for stronger rankings.
So maybe, it’s pseudo true that Google simply doesn’t like Tumblr? Do the people at Tumblr know this? And what are they doing about it?
I’m not suggesting we can fix this issue today - but I wanted to bring it up in hopes that we can create a larger conversation about how the heck Google ranks. Maybe some of you could link to BGC on your blogs or social accounts? Or perhaps you could report back to us on your experiences with traffic coming to your blog from search results. What have you done to see results?
Either way, all people using Tumblr deserve an answer.
