Sphinn - A Problem with StumbleUpon?

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A Problem with StumbleUpon?

Went Hot: April 16, 2008 - 9:03 am
Posted By: fogofeternity 174 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://pandemiclabs.com)
Category: Networking

Thoughts on the algorithm of Stumbleupon and how stumbling your own site might permanently harm its traffic.

9 Comments

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from SpostareDuro 174 days ago #

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Copy / paste: what doesn't seem correct about this, to me, is the fact that there are a multitude of SU users that have been faithful members for years, have many faithful followers (hundreds of faithful fans submitting their URL nearly daily) yet they are still receiving traffic and kudos. So, hmmm. this is bizarre indeed.

from fogofeternity 174 days ago #

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Two factors that spring to mind there. My hunch is that the article overemphasises the negative impact of people other than yourself stumbling articles. And I also think that in the situation you describe, where you've got highly popular SU users with reasonable fan bases, there's probably enough variation in the origins of the stumbles that it's not such a big issue.

In fact, thinking about it perhaps a bigger issue might be whether stumbles come consistently from the same user - i.e. if the same user stumbles your stuff five or six times in a row than the SU algorithm may penalise on that basis.

from SpostareDuro 174 days ago #

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I guess that could be a possibility. I'd like to know how to get to the bottom of this one for sure. Certainly there's got to be a way to get someone to spill the real beans! Although, I'll have to say, it would be like pulling teeth to get SU to reply to anything. Their responses have been less than convenient I'm afraid, and there's certainly no way they're giving up this kind of info. Boo boo boo. I hate it when this happens!

Inquiring minds wanna know.

from bwelford 173 days ago #

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Possibly anyone with a number of blogs on different domains would not get into this particular fix.

from ilamont 173 days ago #

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I've observed this with two domains -- self-stumbling lost its effectiveness after a certain point, although in the first case the tipping point also coincided with a change in the URL structure (went from Drupal 'nodes' to URLs that reflected the title of the article).

One other development that a friend reported when I stumbled one of his blog posts about Apple -- his Adsense account was frozen, after Google noticed the spike. This was someone who was running an educational blog and was doing absolutely no SEO or self-promotion. The spike in stumble-driven traffic was enough to raise flags at Google.

from JamesDuthie 173 days ago #

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I suspect the penalty comes into play when very few Stumbles resonate from the domain. If it is the same person, and only that person Stumbling the site, the Stumble algo probably steps in. It is fairly obvious that self promotion is at play.

I believe the more Stumbles a site receives, the more leeway they're given. It's the only way to explain why popular marketing blogs such as Search Engine People aren't penalised. They would be likely to receive a lot of Stumbles on each post from the same core readership. If the Stumble algo strictly penalised based on repeat Stumblers, blogs like this would be penalised. Yet they seem to escape any penalties (as far as I can tell).

from incrediblehelp 173 days ago #

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I am under the assumption that stumbling your own blog is not possible after so many stumbles. I used to stumble a blog I ran and at some point I was not able to any longer. I reached some sort of ceiling of stumbles to my own URL. Anyone experience this?

I emailed stumble support on it and they verified that with me. It was some time ago so I am sure the email is long gone.

After chatting with them they removed whatever blockage they had on the website.

from fogofeternity 173 days ago #

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I've heard that too, that there's a limit on the number of own URL stumbles you can do. Although I've no idea whether that's a hard figure or something more relative to total submissions. After all there's a big difference between stumbling your own site ten times out of ten, and ten times out of a thousand new discoveries.

from parp 157 days ago #

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I find it difficult to believe that stumbling someone else's website many times could punish it. Otherwise we'd all be offering SEO services that stumble someone else's website out of SU.com!

IME, SU success depends upon the size of your own network (fans), so stumbling your own work won't do too much good unless your fans also consider a decent piece of work. The problem would be if you have a large network who are willing to stumble whatever you stumble.

Perhaps StumbleUpon should just ignore the first couple of votes and only promote a piece with > 5 votes?

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