SEO Tycoon

**Learning Newbie** · 09-24-2007, 02:58 PM

Anyone else played with Stumble Upon? (And when I say played with I mean tried out, not spammed.) It's actually a very cool system. I've been getting back into it, despite the occasional spam, and trying to help the pages worth attention get what they deserve.

But then I noticed this. Sorry, it's really not something that will probably ever get mentioned on my blog, so that leaves it unhosted and having to be an attachment here. But still look at the image. It's a screen cap of some Google SERPs.

See anything different? Pages Stumble knows about are rated with a number of stars according to how good they are, and there's a little icon that takes you to user reviews. Again it's subject to spam to some amount. But it's also a bigger community than spam master joe and in general I think it works out well. How is this SEO? Well it gives the user a boatload more information to work with. Instead of just your meta description tag they can see what other people with similar interests think of the page before clicking through.

The moral of the story? It's not to Spamble, because that will make the community react against you and review your site negatively. It's to put more time into building quality content. The SERPs reviews go both ways. And it's also that instead of a way to get traffic here's a focus group to look at and see how people react to different things. Why would you want to do that? To improve your darn content!

**vangogh** · 09-24-2007, 05:16 PM

I have noticed the star system, though I rarely look at it to make a decision on what to click in the SERPs.

I've been impressed since the beginning with how well StumbleUpon picks sites. When I first heard of the system I kept thinking 'yeah right, I'm going to like some random site,' but far more often than not the site that comes up is pretty cool and I usually spend a couple of minutes at least exploring it.

I agree about not spambling. What people don't realize is that while it might lead to some quick traffic, in the long run it not only won't help, but can potentially do more harm.

**Learning Newbie** · 09-24-2007, 06:43 PM

I wonder how many people are influenced by the Stumbler reviews when they look through the SERPs? I think it's only natural for laypeople to see stars and think they mean something good, even without necessarily knowing what.

On the other hand, I wonder how many people use Stumble Upon? More to the point for most people, how many of your potential customers do?

I think no matter what the answer is it means people should stop and put more energy into making content that will go over well. If everybody turns into Stumblers or Google comes up with their own rating system (they would if they were Microsoft) this would be unquestionably better than links. You could say it's important to set up proxy accounts but people's accounts are tied to the browser not the IP address, so lame crap will get voted down. I think this is a strong encouragement for people to not have lame crap on their site.

**ADAM Web Design** · 09-24-2007, 06:58 PM

The only problem I have with this post is the short-term effect it will create. People will see the image and Spamble away, thinking they can spike SpambleSERPs and end up with referral traffic that way. Maybe one day, though, I'll sign up just to see what I can do to counter it.

**Learning Newbie** · 09-24-2007, 07:53 PM

I'm trying to lend a hand and counter that evil trend. But then I'm a curmudgeony old man according to whym.

One thing I can say for sure tho is Stumble Upon has the "self correcting" property that Wikipedia wishes it had. Once a page breaks out of a spam community (say instead of blog posts I read that I think are worth reading, say I just Stumbled my own posts and got my wife to do the same - a spam network of two that would be) and hits the main stream, people are going to vote no. And it's a big enough population that any particular spam gang is outnumbered - that's why people attack it. Else there would be no traffic.

But I see your point and I really hope I'm right. I thought people were on crack about they're gonna pick some random page and I'm going to like it. Never used the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button either. But they actually collect a lot of data on people, not just your interests, but they encourage people to vote often and vote early, and they save your whims to their database. But then spam is why I stopped using the "show me a new page" button and basically use it to recommend good stuff to others. Hopefully that's not spam, giving credit to the people who've helped me figure it all out?

**vangogh** · 09-24-2007, 10:30 PM

I think StumbleUpon is self correcting too. Maki at DoshDosh.com has done some posts about SU and his most recent view is that stumbling your own pages causes them to stop driving traffic and you're best bet is keep from stumbling your own pages.

From what I've seen and heard stumblers tend to visit more than the one page of your site they land on. The community seems a little more mature than others like Digg.

It does get spammed like other social voting sites, but everything gets spammed. You can also simply buy traffic from SU inexpensively. I think it's 5 cents a click so it's not like it costs all that much to get traffic from them. That might help with some of the spam since it's probably cheaper to buy from the system than it is to figure out how to game the system.

**Learning Newbie** · 09-27-2007, 03:43 PM

Maybe it's just from where I sit in the peanut gallery, but it seems like Digg is dead, Del.icio.us is old hat, and Stumble Upon is the stealth killer. I think it's taking the net by storm at a sloth's pace. It probably gets less attention than it deserves, just because it happened so slowly, there's no overnight jump.

Doing some research for a new blog post, because I think Stumble is going to be important socially (not in the social media sense but there's the potential to have a minor shift in the way people interact outside of Stumble, if they play their hand right) enough to cover in my blog. Wow that's a run on sentence! Anyway, while I was doing said research, I found this.

7 reasons why i thumbed you down on stumbleupon

Quote:

1. pay-wall: if a page you have stumbled displays a pay-wall or expects me to register to view it, it gets a thumb down.
2. page no longer exists, has moved: this just makes sense because i don’t want my friends and followers to be spammed with pages that are no longer there.
3. other social submissions: stumbleupon is a site for sharing content. what this means is stumbling the pages where the content originated, not stumbling pages from other social sites (digg, propeller, reddit, sphinn) where you have submitted the original content. if you want me to vote on something that you have submitted on one of those sites, send it to me without submitting it to and clogging up the stumble index.
4. duplicate submissions or repurposed content with no insight: if you’ve just regurgitated information from elsewhere, please don’t submit it to stumble. it’s not always wrong to post some latest developments to your blog but if you haven’t added any insight, please stumble the original source and not your post.
5. improperly categorized or tagged content: i’ve set my preferences so that i only get pages and pictures, however because people incorrectly tag pages, i often get audio, video, or pdf files. i generally try to report these pages as incorrectly tagged and stumble them down.
6. auto-playing audio or video: one of the most annoying things on stumble is when people incorrectly tag audio/video and then have it play automatically as the page loads.
7. porn, la-la la-la, etc: posts where you are asked to thumb up if you want them to include adult video, or pages that say ‘end of the internet’ are submitted too many times and are equally annoying each time.

what are some of the pages that you thumb down?

I hope it's ok to quote a big chunk of the guy's blog post. I'm doing it for a valid insightful discussion here, I'm giving him a link, and I gave him a thumbs up in Stumble Upon. Much credit to the author, and you should visit his blog to see the flood of comments people left in response. Much credit to the original author.

But as we're talking about spam, Stumble Upon as a whole, and the way they append SERPs, I think this is valuable for the group to see. Knowing that some blogger out there in cyberland is doing his part to fight spam gives me a small amount more faith in the system. Hearing that Adam might get involved righting the problem gives me a lot more, because Adam has unmatched skill at fighting spam. But to know that a person I've never met before is on our team suggests a lot more.