While talking to my good friend Breakaway from Link Building Bible about social media optimization and StumbleUpon, I came across a startling and obviously enormous theory that will change the way everyone will think about Stumbleupon. Forever.
Well, kinda.
STUMBLEUPON KNOWS
Not about that time you accidentally used the wrong bathroom, but about whether your Stumbles are organic or not. That means that if you get a bunch of your friends to thumbs up a page in an attempt to boost its initial traffic, a red alert goes off at the SU headquarters and your page gets blacklisted or at least denied some traffic. I know from experience that even though some of my articles have had 5+ stumbles within two minutes from friends, they never got any visits. In short, inorganic thumbs up that occur within a set period of time after you submit your site probably have a small effect, if any.
ORGANIC VISITS = WIN
StumbleUpon most likely checks whether or not it referred you to the page or if you came there through different means. If you were sent there through http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=”pageurl” then all is well and your thumbs up have power. On the other hand, if you aren’t, they devalue your thumbs up/review. This makes it even harder to game and furthers the fact that the only people that can make an article popular are the actual social media users. Generic make money online blogs aren’t going to be happy about this one!
By Melvin on Jun 14, 2008 | Reply
so how do they penalize? do they decrease your thumbs up?
By Schme Boyard on Jun 14, 2008 | Reply
Does timing and/or location have anything to do with penalization…?
By Max Miroff on Jun 14, 2008 | Reply
@Melvin: I assume they just don’t send traffic to that specific page, or at least send less traffic.
@Schme: Good points. Timing and location probably affect it - a bunch of stumbles from the same place at once that aren’t organic seem suspicious.
By Beat the Bank on Jun 15, 2008 | Reply
So does this mean that encouraging people to stumble by say providing a button could damage your chance of recieving traffic? or is the penalization more sophisticated involving timing location etc as mentioned above?
Beat The Bank
PS new to stumble upon, how effective is it at creating traffic?
By Max Miroff on Jun 15, 2008 | Reply
@These are the kinds of things that are hard to determine. I can see how determining whether the inorganic stumbles were actually organic so I assume there’s some kind of timing involved. I’ll see if I can contact Stumbleupon about this to get some more clarification.
By diamond engagement ring on Jun 16, 2008 | Reply
Stumble used to be one of the “bookmarking” type sites that didn’t seem to monitor carefully if people were gaming it. Problem I find with this traffic is that people are just more fleeting then Digg or Reddit. It’s like channel surfing.
By shearyadi on Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
I’m new at this stuff, but I think encouraging people to stumble by providing button is to create organic visits, because SU providing the buttons for us.
But, maybe sending an url to your friends and ask them to stumble that page on your site, that would set the red alarm
Nice post Max, stumbled! Hope that is organic visit
By Marketing Ignite on Jul 1, 2008 | Reply
It’s good to watch but this matter when inorganic stumbles it harder to get
By Carnival of Making Money Online on Jul 8, 2008 | Reply
If you’re going to stumble yourself, make sure you find a group of friends to stumble it after you. From my experience a high number of followup thumbs ups will increase your reputation and the number of subsequent stumbles your sites receive.
By Max Miroff on Jul 8, 2008 | Reply
@Carnival: Haha, that’s exactly what this post advocates against =p
By Austin on Jul 25, 2008 | Reply
It’s all about having good content. Yes it’s true that SU does penalize for non-organic thumbs ups, BUT if you (whoever is submitting their pages) have great content and if others BESIDES YOUR STUMBLEUPON FRIENDS think you have great content and thumb up your pages, your penalty will be lifted and the flood gates can/might open again for you.
A great example is this post. I came here from a Google search of “most visits from stumbleupon”. Since I think this is a great post, I’m going to thumbs this post up. If I were to send this page to a SU friend and if they liked it and send it to their friends, SU would be hurting themselves by not delivering it to other users.
Of course, this all depends on the stumbler that’s rating a page. Is that person a trusted SU member with a history of quality submits, or a “I’ll stumble anything that walks” type of Stumbler.
By RisaOptispTic on Aug 2, 2008 | Reply
Brilliant!
By AlexM on Aug 16, 2008 | Reply
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
By Seamus Anthony on Sep 29, 2008 | Reply
I always stumble my own posts (and even other people’s sometimes!) but yesterday I stumbled my latest, but this morning I checked and there was no record for the page, so I stumbled it again - again no record for the stumble. is this a Stumble Slap? Have they got my number for promoting my own stuff mercilessly?
By tim on Oct 6, 2008 | Reply
good