Expired Tumblrs are a great way to boost your rankings and a lot of SEOs use them in their link-building strategy.
I’ll be honest here, it used to work great back in the days but I am not sure how effective they are now. Yet people still use them and I’ll show you how I used to find Tumblers.
In this awesome guide, I’ll show you three methods of how to find expired Tumblr domains with good metrics. Two of these methods are completely free while the last method involves paid software.
How To Find Expired Tumblr Blogs: Proven Methods
Method 1 – Using The Wayback Machine
Using archive.org is my favorite method to find expired Tumblrs, and it’s 100% FREE and super fast. Plus, you can find them based on a niche or keywords!
⚡Also Read: Social Fortress SEO
Step 01 Finding Potential Tumblr URLs
First up, we need to find a list of old Tumblr blogs to check if they are expired.
This is where the Wayback Machine comes in. They are basically a digital archive of the internet and have archived billions of web pages. They let you search their archive by domains or by keywords.
We are going to do keyword searches to find a list of Tumblr these guys have archived. Most of the time the Tumblrs you are going to find here are old and have a good chance of being deleted.
Head over to web.archive.org and type your niche or keyword + tumblr in the search box and hit enter. I am going to take cats as an example.
This will give you a list of Tumblrs they archived.
Note: Keep in mind that they won’t show you everything here so you might need to try the niche in different ways to get more results. For example, you can use synonyms, Cat – feline, kitty etc..
Now you need to copy the Tumblr links into a notepad.
You can do it manually or use something like Link Grabber and copy them and then use the “replace” feature to remove the web.archive.org/.. part from the start of the link.
Step 02 Check Which Tumblrs Have Expired Or Deleted
Now you need to check which of the domains have been expired. Checking this manually will take quite a while so we are going to use a Bulk HTTP status code checker.
Expired Tumblr domains will return a 404 error and we can easily find them by running them through the status checker.
Load up the site, put into the URLs, and click “Check Status”
On the top, you’ll see a dropdown that says “All status codes”. Click on that and select 404. This will give us all the expired Tumblrs from our list!
I found quite a few from the first cat search:
Step 03 Checking The Metrics
Checking the SEO metrics of these Tumblrs is super important – after all, you are doing this for the link juice!
You can use Ahrefs or Moz to get this done, but I always run them on a bulk DA checker first.
Ideally, you would want stuff that’s at least DA 20+ and PA 20+, and you need to check their link profiles for anchor text and spam. I’ll not go into details on this as there are plenty of expired domain vetting guides on Google.
Turns out I found a couple of Tumblrs with good stats from the example we did.
You can go ahead and register them if you want 🙂
Method 2 – Using A Backlink Analyzer
You may have noticed that a LOT of Tumblrs have some kind of link (in the footer, sidebar, or even header) back to Tumblr.com.
This means all these blogs will show up as referring domains on the link profile of Tumblr.com and all we need to do to find these is to use an SEO tool to filter the link profile.
I am going to use Semrush in this example but you can use Ahrefs, Moz, or even Ubersuggest. All these have free trials so this method is pretty much FREE.
⚡Also Read: Using Keyword Surfer
Step 01 Filter And Export The Referring Domains
Open up the link explorer and put in Tumblr.com and hit enter.
Head over to the “Referring Domains” tabs and scroll down a bit to see all the domains linking to tumblr.com and the filter options.
On the search box, type tumblr.com to search for domains that have “tumblr.com” in the URL which would give us all the subdomains. You can also filter these by category and authority using the “Category” and “Authority Score” filters.
Note: I wouldn’t really use Semrush’s authority score because it isn’t really a good measure.
After filtering, export the data into a spreadsheet.
Step 02 Identifying And Checking Expired Tumblrs
Just like before, we are now going to use an http status checker to bulk check the domains we exported and see which returns a 404.
Head over to httpstatus.io and paste in the domains (it only allows 100 at a time) and hit run. Afterward filter these by 404 errors, and you get your expired Tumblrs!
Do this for the entire list of domains in your export and make a doc with the expired Tumblrs.
Next, it’s time to check the metrics. The free bulk checker I mentioned only allows 10 domains at once so it might take some time to check all the domains.
As I said before, choose DA 20+ Tumblrs and do some domain vetting like spam checks and link profile analysis.
⚡Also Read: Google Sites SEO guide
Method 3 – Using Scrapebox
Unfortunately, this method is not free and Scrapebox costs like $60, but this is the most comprehensive way to find Tumblrs according to keywords or niche.
The process is easier to understand by watching so here’s a good video of how to find expired Tumblr domains using Scrapebox:
Final Thoughts
I have only tested methods 1 and 2 and found method 1 to be the best and it always gets me awesome domains. A lot of people use Scrapebox for this and if you can buy it, definitely give it a try to method 3.
Hope you find this guide useful. If you need any help or know of any out-of-the-box methods to find expired Tumblrs – please let us know in the comments!
