Thursday, July 9, 2009

Does StumbeUpon Penalize Non-Organic Stumbles?

StumbleUpon ToolbarImage via Wikipedia


...That's what Max Miroff of Blog Badly thinks. In a vague, yet interesting post he writes:

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.

I've actually seen this happen to a few of my posts, though how, why, or when it happens is still unclear to me. My recent post on how to make butter in under 5 minutes totally blew up on SU, but others that had more stumbles didn't. hmm?

Do any of you have any experience with this? Is your Stumble Upon traffic still consistent? I'd love to hear if your SU traffic has changed.

6 comments:

  1. I can't figure out for the life of me how StumbleUpon drives traffic, but it certainly varies a lot. I get the feeling it depends on who the Stumbler is more than anything. I've never asked anyone to Stumble for me, so can't comment on that strategy.

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  2. As an active stumbler I think that has something true. Organic rank better, this is the reason why asking stumbles permanently isn’t good.

    Sometimes I stumble an article and alone raises the “stars” organically this is the best way.

    About the social media traffic depend a lot of the quality of the stumbler, friends and visitors.

    Cheers!

    Gera

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  3. SU traffic in terribly inconsistent - I'll get traffic from a post that gets one thumbs up, but then nothing that gets four or five from random folks. Overall, I'm unimpressed with the service.

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  4. agreed- I get virtualy no traffic from SU posts I send to friends. However, if people reach them organically it is a different story. Would love to try a different strategy, like asking your frineds to give posts a thumbs up only once per day... or maybe you get penalized if always the same people come across as stumbling you?
    Would love to further this conversation...
    great post!

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  5. great comments everyone.

    vannessa, that's the great mystery here...no one seems to know how SU bases their traffic. I've been trying a new method where I only ask two or three friends to thumbs up a post a day....will report the results soon.

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  6. Another thing I just remembered is that some of my really old posts continue to generate SU traffic, while recent stumbles (even ones that have done well) die off after a few days. WTF?

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