Apparently, Tumblr doesn't get a lot of love from Google. - Steve Rubel

Good to know for commercial blogs -- I only use it personally for videos and images mostly - Shey, Jamaican of FF

whenever I check statistics of tumblr the number of visits to tumblr.com is equal to the number of visits to funkyboy.tumblr.com. Not much useful... - funkyboy

Tumblr is a mortification story for blogging world! : ) - Erhan Erdoğan

I have a tumblr account for personal use. after I heard about tumblr has problems with seo, I like it more - ahmet bulent

Not trying to be contrary, but is it Tumblr that's creating the problem? Maybe partially, but very few free blogging platforms get much engine love right out of the box, and it doesn't look like a lot of effort was made to optimize it. It ranks #3 & 4 for [cara austin], right behind her main site. Google has indexed over 100 pages, many of which are just photos. No unique titles, no descriptions, very little content. Exactly what queries is this site NOT doing well for that it SHOULD do well for? - Erik Dafforn

Interesting idea that it's not Tumblr but the content. I am planning on porting the content over to wordpress, so I'll have a one-to-one experiment to test against. I think that the big issue with Tumblr is that without a lot of customization, it isn't easy to create that SEO-friendly content - like titles, descriptions, tags, categories, etc....all that stuff that gets posts indexed. Thanks for the interesting point, though - I will definitely keep it in mind. (Also, the day after I posted that, her the blog moved up to #3 & 4 for [cara austin] - before that, it was like 12th.) - Melissa Chang

Search engines are helpful, but because Tumblr allows us to follow other tumblelogs and they appear in our dashboards, there isn't a huge need for one, if you can find new ones on your own. Another reason I don't like WordPress is that, you have to pay a fee to customize your own CSS and use your own domain. Tumblr has all this for free. I don't think SEO's are a big problem compared to this, or maybe WordPress is just trying to get a few bucks? @Erik: I can agree with you, coding does take up our time. - Josh Jenkins

I knew there was a reason why I stayed on Blogger. :) - Ontario Emperor

@Josh @Melissa @Erik See here and let me know what you think: http://x98.us/d0b - David Ambrose

@David: So the page views aren't as low as we though--on some blogs. It depends on your popularity I guess. Though, I still believe tumblr can improve, if not on SEO features. - Josh Jenkins

I did some quick testing and it appears that {PostTitle} does not do anything useful and {Caption} is not permitted between title tags. So basic SEO techniques do not appear to be usable. - Jauder Ho

The URLs are worthless and the lack of post titles makes tumblr a terrible choice if you care about search engine traffic. More here - http://tinyurl.com/5j5g56 - Bjorn Stromberg

@Bjorn @Jauder @Josh Hopefully we can cause a stir and awaken the sleeping Tumblr giant in Manhattan: http://datainsightsideas.com/post... - David Ambrose

@David You may make a good point about Tumblr being able to be customized to make it seo friendly - but the reason that I used Tumblr in the first place (and why most people use it) is b/c it's simple and you don't have to be a developer or get a developer involved to use it. Having to mess around with the code defeats that purpose. - Melissa Chang

@Melissa That's a very big reason why I decided to launch my first blog on Tumblr. It was easy, no-fills posting. "Great," I thought. But I started to notice that Tumblr was living in its own universe: folks went lived in the Dashboard and never really escaped. Post titles and dates were never really correct. It gets frustrating when you spend time to write (and not merely bookmarklet sites) and then it vanishes into thin air. - David Ambrose

David - I would say the same for LiveJournal and, to an extent, Facebook. Nice gardens, but walled nonetheless. - Phil G

@Phil. For sure! Great way to put it. - David Ambrose

You are aware that you can add post titles using {block:PostTitle} {PostTitle} {/block:PostTitle} ? - pratham

I think it's fair to say that T could be more seo-friendly by default with title tags, pulling X chars from the body as a meta desc., etc. But I also think comparing it to WP is unfair, because in many cases (not all), people post far less original content and use it differently. It doesn't seem to have crawling issues. Plenty of WP blogs do fine with URLs like /?p=50 if other things are in place. Those things now exist in WP because the community made them possible via plugins and smart templates. - Erik Dafforn

@ptm see @Erik's response below. It's the idea of having SEO-friendly post titles as default that makes sense to the community. - David Ambrose

Maybe a site like FF, as a third-party site giving some linkage to Tumblr posts, will be what some people need to get some search engine attention. External linkage is a big part of the puzzle that we haven't discussed. If you have a Tumblr blog and 25 active FF friends, that should start to make a difference sooner or later, providing you're writing about things that people are searching for. - Erik Dafforn

@Erik FF is a big push to my site, but a lot comes from Twitter as well as Facebook...which is interesting. - David Ambrose

@David that is very interesting. I'm fascinated to see how the traffic funnel develops. One benefit of FF and Twitter's "open" state is that unlike with Facebook (whose public profile shows "some" of your friends), bots see all your friends and you benefit from activity and making friends. Oddly, I would not have known about Tumblr if not for seeing people's FF feeds... So I think the two (FF and Tumblr) will benefit each other. - Erik Dafforn

@Eric That's right on. I'll post some screenshots from Google Analytics around FF, Twitter and Facebook modules. - David Ambrose

This discussion is disappointing, guys. Tumblelogs (and Tumblr specifically) can index EXTREMELY well, which actually forced us to turn away droves of affiliate spammers after we became their platform of choice last summer. My silly tumblelog at davidslog.com is 1st on Google for "david karp" and 17th for "david" (above David Pogue). There have been some seriously uninformed comparisons here. --- A couple of you seemed to have two useful suggestions: Adding keywords to Tumblr URLs, and sending {PostTitle} a summary when there isn't a title. These would have made excellent feature requests instead of FUD like "a terrible choice if you care about search engine traffic". We'll be incorporating both today. - David Karp

@David @Phil The Dashboard (and tumblr.com) accounts for less than 10% of Tumblr traffic. - David Karp

@David I'm not saying that this conversation is "FUD"; rather, quite the opposite. Thanks for stopping by and implementing the features. - David Ambrose

Wow, that's a fast response. I'll be happy about the {PostTitle} summary! - rodmitch

@ptm Yes I am aware of it but as of yesterday it was not producing anything really useful. @David Karp, good to see that you are listening to the conversation. I would suggest 2 things. 1) Make both {PostTitle} and {Caption} available in the title as well as meta description (or make Caption = PostTitle) and 2) enable Title as url so that something like http://foo.com/posts... works. Looking forward to the improvements. - Jauder Ho

Tumblr does index well. Particularly if you use text posts with titles. - Chris M

SEO has nothing to do with Tumblr and everything to do with how your theme is written. This is the same thing with Wordpress. The idea that Tumblr somehow is inherently poor for SEO is based on misinformation. - Anthony De Rosa