Tumblr: Dumber than a box of rocks

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How many free blog hosts are there on the Internet? Blogger, Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress.com, BlogEasy, BlogSavy, and according to Google, probably thousands of others. They all have two things in common: They are free, and they want you to create a blog on their site. I don’t always understand the business model behind giving away free services, but it’s generally safe to assume these companies are somehow making money when you create a blog on their site and draw traffic.

Which is why it’s so utterly perplexing to me that Tumblr decided to indiscriminately kill every new account created since the 30-Day Challenge recommended them as a platform. Thousands of new customers, nearly all getting highly ranked in Google, drawing in potentially tens of thousands of new visitors every day? Tumblr is not a heavily monetized site, but still, I assume they have some way of making money from all this new traffic. And even if they are purely a hobbyist site, what gripe could they have with increasing traffic?

There’s only one explanation: The guy/people/company (whatever) behind Tumblr is, in fact, dumber than a box of rocks. I’ll let him demonstrate his genius here:

SEO niche keyword spammers have discovered that Tumblr matters and ranks well. Crap.

Tumbler doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t rank well. It was an easy to use blog host whose content creators matter and rank well. Tumblr doesn’t matter one bit; my blog was up and running on Blogger within twenty minutes of my ban. Tumblr.com doesn’t even rank in the top 500 on the “free blog host” search. Face it dude, you don’t matter. Your success is 100% dependent upon the customers you so casually threw away.

Example spam tumblelogs that I won’t link on principle:
- howtosellacar.tumblr.com
- how-to-learn-french.tumblr.com
- titan-quest-strategy-guide.tumblr.com

I didn’t see the other two, but I did see “How To Learn French”. It was banned after only one post, a two page blog article offering generally useful, serious advice for someone interested in learning a foreign language. I assume there was an affiliate link somewhere in the article, but it was hardly disruptive to the quality of the content. You have, of course, already banned these sites so people can’t judge for themselves whether they were ban-worthy.

They call themselves “affiliate marketers”. I call them scum, and I’ve already developed accurate heuristics for detecting them.

If you define “Ban everyone whose account was created after August 16″ an accurate heuristic, then you really are an idiot. There were accounts banned that did not contain affiliate marketing links. There were accounts banned that hadn’t even posted their first article yet. Don’t lie to the Internet.. you will get caught. The BANS were most likely automatic and certainly indiscriminate. The least you could have done was e-mailed people with a warning, or respond to customer service requests for an explanation. You’ve also blocked out new customers, either to spite the 30-Day Challengers or because you’re clumsy and stupid… new sign-ups now take you to a content policy page, but don’t actually create an account. Genius!

If Davidville decides to remove them, they’re getting nuked. I absolutely will not tolerate spam on my sites, even if it’s entered by humans and attempts to pass as legitimate content.

You obviously don’t have a problem with affiliate marketing in general, since five of the seven blogs on “Today’s Top Tumblelogs” contain affiliate links more blatant than anything in my blog. I had three articles on my site when it was “nuked”. Maybe not the best content on the planet, but they were absolutely relevant to my topic, and far more useful to the world than your own blog.