Being Geek Chic is a blog for stylish geeks, sophisticated nerds and people who enjoy the musings of a complete dork. Join us as we dream of driving the TARDIS, cuddle with our eBooks and test out an iPad sleeve. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi and a team of brilliant lady nerds. Meet the team.
I want to tell you a story. It’s a rather useless story, but it’s a true one and I figure one (or many?) of you might be able to identify.
So I have been on a quest to find the perfect pair of black skinny pants. I had the perfect pair, but they’ve been worn so regularly and with such love that they are now a very sad muted, washed out, run down grey-brown-blegh color. This story wouldn’t even have to be told if I would have done the wise thing and bought two pairs when I got these delightful pants from Gilt a few years back, but this is the shit that happens when you shop in sporadic sprees of internet crazy.
After weeks of flash sale sites and internet super stores failing me terribly, I thought I’d hit up some of the brick and mortar shops to find a suitable replacement. I didn’t. I thought I did. But I didn’t. And why did I fail? Because as it turns out, the vast majority of black skinny pants are actually black skinny jeans for people with really swollen ankles.
Let me point out the difference:
I define “black skinny pants" as just that. Cotton pants made of solid black fabric that are cut like skinny jeans.
I define “black skinny jeans" as jeans that have been dyed black.
This is a critical point of differentiation. The former can be passably worn to work on any day of the week. The latter are reserved for Fridays only and as a result are quickly not worth the investment.
On top of my textile issues, I have also determined that I either A) have the skinniest ankles on planet earth or B) pants are now being made for people with very swollen ankles. I get it: the ankle bone protrudes ever so slightly from the leg, but does this mean I need a 70s bell bottom opening for my joints? No, no it does not.
Then I sauntered into one of the stores that I often imagined was amazing from my small town in Minnesota, until I actually went into one and realized that it’s not nearly as patriotic as the store’s “Classic Flag Tees" would have you believe. It’s just cheap. But I gave it a shot and hoped Old Navy would be able to solve this issue for me, because they had several pairs of pants that met my needs. Hoorah. NOT. I bought the Divas in black, washed them and wore them. And then, the smell. It began wafting about me, fooling me into thinking I had burnt my Amy’s Frozen Pizza. But no, my friends. IT WAS THE PANTS.
Let it be known: Old Navy’s pants smell like burnt beans. And apparently, no amount of washing and airing and drying or vinegaring (yes, that’s a thing) can destroy this stink. And as Google often does, it reminds me that I’m not alone in my bizarre searches.
So now I’m back on the hunt. Black pants, I know you are out there. Please Google, help me find them.
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.
