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Why Yahoo’s Tumblr Takeover is Interesting

Justin Aldridge

This week, it was announced that Yahoo would be buying blogging website Tumblr for an eye-watering $1.1 billion. This move has not gone down well with Tumblr’s users, who have enjoyed years of almost completely unfiltered posting. Tumblr is unique in that it pushes images to the forefront of the blogging experience, and its users are concerned that Yahoo will try to interfere with the way the site is run and conventionalise the blogging platform.

yahoo tumblr

What’s really interesting is that in the few hours after the takeover was announced, WordPress announced a massive spike where more than 70,000 posts were imported to its system, the majority of these believed to be from Tumblr users protesting against the ‘threat’ of Yahoo.

There are two reasons this situation is interesting. Firstly, a search engine attaching itself to a blogging platform is always going to spark the interest of those in the SEO industry. Will this change the way information on Tumblr affects Yahoo searches? It’s relatively unusual in the UK to see SEO companies optimising websites for Yahoo, but if it makes the most of its new relationship with Tumblr, this could have some very interesting results.

Secondly, the exodus of Tumblr users to rival WordPress shows that bloggers aren’t afraid to switch platforms if the current situation isn’t working for them. Fortunately for SEO types, WordPress is already one of the most popular blogging sites in the world, so the richer the content base the better as far as we’re concerned.

Only time will tell what Yahoo decides to do with Tumblr, but we will be incredibly interested to see whether or not this has an impact on the SEO industry.