What factors cause a tumblr blog to rank higher than a real website?

On a few particular keywords I am looking to dominate, I'm continuing to find that my competition is coming primarily from aged, inactive, adult tumblr blogs, with images and almost no text.

I'm curious as to what factors cause my site to rank second behind a simple tumblr image blog. Could it simply be that these blogs that are several years old just take time to drop in rankings as new, stronger competitors emerge?

Any insight would be appreciated!

If it was an active big blog it was probably getting thousands if not millions reblogs a month. If they did put their blog's URL as source in the images , that's a lot of backlinks you're up against. even though there is no text the shear quantity of those links is getting them rank. Funny part is most of those blog owners have no idea they rank

Ah that would make a lot of sense. Perhaps I have been approaching Tumblr the wrong way. I was seeing great success getting followers/reblogs in my niche, but not so much traffic as a result of the work put into it. However, maybe the power in Tumblr lies in the image source, which then translates into live backlinks not so much traffic driving.

And yea no kidding. I'm sure a lot of Tumblr blog owners who just run them as a hobby have no clue of the goldmines they are sitting on.

Appreciate the insight!

Dante12 said:

If it was an active big blog it was probably getting thousands if not millions reblogs a month. If they did put their blog's URL as source in the images , that's a lot of backlinks you're up against. even though there is no text the shear quantity of those links is getting them rank. Funny part is most of those blog owners have no idea they rank

Click to expand...

Put up their blog URL as source in the images...care to explain this part plz.

When you post an image on Tumblr, on the bottom left there's a link icon which when clicked allows you to type in any URL you want which will effectively act as the images source.

"What factors cause a tumblr blog to rank higher than a real website?"

It's relevance (pics and associated tags in this case) and the power/quality of it's links. Tumblr already has a DA of ~90, so it (usually) doesn't take much to push it up to the top of the SERPS, especially for low/med keywords. You can also get away with sending higher volumes of lower quality links to a Tumblr propertyand not be penalized.

check there backlinks and you will know ......

As you mentioned adult niche, I have also noticed it at times. To be honest, a lot of tumblr users still use or go for adult content. Their blogs are also restricted with proper guidelines as per search engines (tumblr does it by default). In addition, there is high authority of tumblr (DA of 98+ for example) which automatically results in some authority for the subdomains. So, these get ranked well. However, this holds mainly true only for adult niches and I have rarely seen tumblr at the top of Google for non-adult terms. I see a lot lesser blogger blogs too nowadays at the top of Google compared to say a few years ago. It was possible to create a blogger blog and then spam it with backlinks and then rank at the top a few years ago. But that is not true anymore.

I have a similar story..

In my niche there is a xxxx.tripod.com crappy website from 2003 that is ranking page number 1 on my search results. I tracked down the lady that owns it to ask her for a link and she said she's not updated it in years and has forgotten the password.