Everyone currently panicking and asking people to follow their twitters, because of the recent news, feels like an impending apocalyptic event, where society and civilization are ultimately crumbling down
As of today, November 17, 2018, any post with links, any links, even to other tumblr posts, just donât show up anymore in tumblrâs search engine.
I just found out about it, after I posted a fic with a link to my masterlist and it got little to no notes (it shuldnât). I was right – the moment I deleted the links, my post magically appeared in the search again. Wow.
Please spread the word to warn the others.
This affects artists who want to cross promote their work, writers who want to link to previous chapters or to a masterlist, and editors who want to link to their YouTube channels, among just a few. This new policy will kill content creatorsâ ability to spread their work, and for what? A poor attempt to use the algorithm to crack down on porn bots and scammers? Sad.
In the meantime, hereâs what I suggest: post your work with no added links, and tell people to check the notes for your masterlist, story navigation, links to ko-fi, patreon, and other social media sites. Make sure you have all those things ready, then paste it into a reblog and have people access them that way. Itâs stupid, but itâs a work around weâll have to use until tumblr gets their act together.
Reblogging this here because I put links in pretty much all my posts so Iâm going to basically disappear from Tumblr searches, more so than I already have (as a NSFW blog Iâm already mostly invisible). Iâve been using a redirect for my patreon link that doesnât even work on mobile, as many of you have contacted me about, but since it doesnât matter anymore Iâm just going to go back to using the direct link. All of my comics have links to other pages so this will also be unsearchable through the main tumblr platform.Â
Reblogging is pretty much the only way new folks are going to be able to find works with links in them anymore so consider reblogging works you like more frequently so that people will see them. At least until this terrible website dies lol.