Stumble Upon ethics v/s SEO practices
I would call me stupid if I were to assume that everyone at the blogosphere thinks alike over a thing. Yes, differences are inevitable and welcome. If you can learn from the differences, that would be a great habit to keep.
Makes no sense huh? Let me explain.
Last day I wrote an article on How to be a top stumbler in less than a week, and it got mixed response from the blogosphere. Now, this post taught me some lessons from the discussions and reviews it got. The particular post was stumbled and it gave me some great traffic too. Many readers liked the article and stumbled it further to the top. Happy that I was.
But, now the interesting part. The article came to the attention of a top stumbler. And she simply thumbs down the article! Agony, pain, whatever you call it, I too felt it. The top stumbler was a lady and she wrote a negative review for the article in her stumbled list.
It said that the article is too focused on numbers(making large amount of stumbles in less time) and such content is clearly not entertained by stumblers. Good, quality stumblers (like her) like great content and they have been doing the exercise of stumbling such great pages for a long time. Practices like what I suggested would bring down the quality of stumbles and will corrupt the idea itself.
In my opinion this was a great review. In fact I was so touched by the review that I decided to contact her. On email, I told her that she was true about the article being focused on numbers, but I did not mean to degrade the system or anything of that sort.
After some email exchanges she was willing to pull off her review, but was keen on me communicating to my readers and clarifying that this is not an article just to boost numbers.
Now, what do you understand from the episode?
It was an interesting one for me because, I was under the impression that getting the attention of stumble upon users is a good thing and working to get that traffic is just great! After all, I’m an SEO and the numbers thing is what I’m most attracted about.
But from this episode I understood that Stumble Upon is not just a traffic generating machine, it is also a group of people who are looking out for quality content, and just want to see/rate more good sites. There is a quality factor involved and anything that will focus on numbers and not content is not welcome by the group.
Many of you would have already known this, but I just thought this little thing could be of interest to bloggers because, even if all bloggers think alike, others outside the brackets may disagree with you on it, because you are just focused on traffic to your site. Stop being selfish you …..blogger ! 
Written by Mani Karthik from Daily SEO BlogPosted on November 18th, 2007 and filed under Blogging
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8 Responses to “Stumble Upon ethics v/s SEO practices”
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Mani, that’s a great personal story we can all learn from. It’s very true that many other people see any attempt to get links and build traffic through social media as “gaming” or “corrupting” the system — and in some cases, I would agree.
Although you can submit your own articles, for example, and it’s not against the terms of service, and you could look at it as sharing… most people look at it as spamming. So it is better if someone else submits or stumbles your articles. And that’s more likely to happen if you’re creating great, noteworthy content. I think people want the stumbles without having to earn them.
I love that you contacted the person and you both really got to see things from the other’s point of view. Now you both have a more expanded view of the world.
Yes Michael, it was very interesting to see things from the other perspective, it helped me find out my “mistake”.
It was interesting to see that SU (or any service) is seen in two different ways by two people. Sometimes what we bloggers think is OK is not OK for somebody else.
I haven’t stumbled my own article, if you took it that way
That’s sure is not a good idea according to me.
Cheers!
Mani
News flash! There are groups of stumblers who will team “thumbs down” any blog article that suggests using SU as a promotional tool, even in general terms. Soon SU will be like Digg where any post that doesn’t meet the criteria of these groups is buried. Talk about gaming the system.
“But from this episode I understood that Stumble Upon is not just a traffic generating machine, it is also a group of people who are looking out for quality content, and just want to see/rate more good sites. There is a quality factor involved and anything that will focus on numbers and not content is not welcome by the group.”
i too think so frd .. its absolutely right with quality… i haven’t experienced with lots of stumbles to my site but have read a lot on it like u also have written in here…
I wouldn’t worry about “How to be a top stumbler in less than a week” getting a mixed review. Controversy is just good linkbait.
I am glad I spent a little time to try and do this the right way. Your follow up to the first article is very informative and will probably help SU be a more robust site.
Thanks again.