Published: Apr 16, 2008 - 09:03 am
Story Found By: fogofeternity 1398 Days ago
Category: Social Media
9 Comments
9 Comments
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Copy / paste: what doesnt 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.
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 youve got highly popular SU users with reasonable fan bases, theres probably enough variation in the origins of the stumbles that its 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.
I guess that could be a possibility. Id like to know how to get to the bottom of this one for sure. Certainly theres got to be a way to get someone to spill the real beans! Although, Ill have to say, it would be like pulling teeth to get SU to reply to anything. Their responses have been less than convenient Im afraid, and theres certainly no way theyre giving up this kind of info. Boo boo boo. I hate it when this happens! Inquiring minds wanna know.
Possibly anyone with a number of blogs on different domains would not get into this particular fix.
Ive 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.
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 theyre given. Its the only way to explain why popular marketing blogs such as Search Engine People arent 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).
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.
Ive heard that too, that theres a limit on the number of own URL stumbles you can do. Although Ive no idea whether thats a hard figure or something more relative to total submissions. After all theres a big difference between stumbling your own site ten times out of ten, and ten times out of a thousand new discoveries.
I find it difficult to believe that stumbling someone elses website many times could punish it. Otherwise wed all be offering SEO services that stumble someone elses website out of SU.com!IME, SU success depends upon the size of your own network (fans), so stumbling your own work wont 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?