Last week, Jiannis wrote a great post called “Why You Shouldn’t Stumble Yourself” in which he brought up the seemingly little-known fact that the more you stumble pages within the same URL, the less effective your stumble becomes. The post stirred up a lot of great discussion and got me thinking a lot more about the Stumble algorithm and the important steps that need to be taken when using Stumble for social media marketing purposes.
A major point of the post was there is a mysterious ratio buried deep within the innards of the SU algorithm that compares your total number of stumbles to the number of stumbles you have given to any specific URL. This was brought to my attention by a comment on the post mentioned above. The comment is from Kimota, and I quote him here with many thanks.
I recently saw my stumble traffic plummet and my submissions from my own domain no longer get accepted. SU didn’t even respond to my enquiries as to why this would be. It wasn’t until days of research had gone by that I discovered a buried little paragraph deep down on one of the SU pages that mentioned the ratio of one domain to other stumbles being a factor and that if this ratio is tipped, SU prevents you from submitting any more from that domain and affects your entire traffic. No warning and no possible way of readjusting the ratio to repair the damage.“
The most immediate application of this knowledge is that you have to be very careful when submitting your own content to StumbleUpon. If you submit all of your own stuff over and over again, it is going to get less effective. Kimota knows this first hand.
Of particular–even alarming–interest, though, are the repercussions of “tipping” this magic ratio. To better discuss this question, lets say there are two elements: the Offender (the user) and the URL (the URL that has been submitted too much). Is it simply that StumbeUpon stops counting URL submissions from the Offender, or is the URL blacklisted? In the same comment, Kimota goes on to say, “Even when someone else stumbles me, I’m not getting anywhere near the same figures.”
Could it be that the URL is punished for the sins of one overzealous SU user? Can your frequent self-submission ruin the SU traffic potential of your URL even if you never submit yourself again?
Of course, this is the kind of social media sensationalism that gets rumors started and some of you might think this is tantamount to tabloid journalism. Let me be clear right now, I do not know the answers to the questions. Indeed, when it comes to the mysterious web algorithms out there, we are all making our best guesses based upon research.
The ultimate takeaway here is to be overly careful when it comes to helping your fledgling blog through its baby steps. But I am very interested by the idea that a URL as a whole could be penalized for being submitted by the same users all the time. I can’t imagine that would be the case, because that would actually penalize a blogger for having a rabid fan base. I greatly welcome any input and discussion from those of you who can provide insight (anecdotal or, even better, factual). Have you noticed trends? Take a look at your own stats and share them with the community in the comments. As we get some good stuff together, I will round it all up into a follow up post. Let the learning begin.
Woah, now there’s an example of the power of commenting on other blogs.
I’d be interested to see other feedback on the SU algorithm and whether anywone else has experienced traffic drop offs. I recently got SU traffic flowing again by joining a social forum where we swap stumbles, diggs etc to boost blog traffic. Worked for a week – in fact got some record numbers, but then dropped dramatically. The last two posts of mine received stumble traffic I can count on one hand, even after other members of this group submitted them.
I find it hard to believe a url would be penalised, as the algorithm certainly has no way of knowing which member profile is the webmaster for the url. But I think it does illustrate that the algorithm does very quickly identify repeat submitters and then removes a lot of their authority with regards to the domain.
I’m led to believe that the best way to use SU is to be lucky enough to have a different person submit you each time. In the meantime, my traffic is struggling again and I[’m finding it very hard to get my blog to that level of critical mass of subscriptions and natural traffic that will allow me to relax and let social media happen organically.
I would be curious to know if there is a difference in giving your own content a thumbs up or discovering it in terms of effectiveness.
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.
When I was a StumbleUpon newbie I stumbled too many of my own posts and sure enough all my traffic from SU dried up, even when other people stumbled them. So this indicated that the entire domain was penalised.
However, this was NOT permanent. After a while, it came back and now I enjoy plenty of SU traffic and just occasionally thumb my stuff (though rarely).
This would seem to me to indicate that is perfectly possible to stuff up your opponents traffic by stumbling them a lot. Surely there’s more to it than that? BUt from what I’ve experienced, and Carline as well, seems to indicate that this may be true. This of course means a domain’s popularity could also count against it.
Makes it very hard to spread a new blog if the same loyal readers can’t submit it.
I do about 30 to one, and in the 30 I hit blogs of people I know. I do stumble a lot, but probably don’t submit enough. One day I will probably be banned for not counting.
Interesting data just in…
On Sunday, a previous post of mine was submitted by one reader and was thumbed up by all-round good egg Richard McLaughlin above. It referred about five stumblers to the page. Chicken feed.
Richard just submitted my latest post a couple of hours ago and I’ve received 60 stumblers. Why did his opinion count one day and not another? Was the first post penalised because SU doesn’t like the original referrer, even if Richard also stumbled the article later?
The algorithm just doesn’t seem to make sense. Anyone else got any interesting data?
What you described has happened to me. I haven’t been able to Stumble my site in months. I think Stumble should reconsider their policy because the current one will only encourage people to just make more and more accounts so they can stumble their blogs/websites.
Any idea what this ‘magic ratio is’ ? I usually stumble 2:1 or 3:1 and haven’t been penalized.
I wish I had read this post before I got penalized by SU.
I have been stumbling my posts for a while, and suddenly I received a blank (white) page every time I tried to submit any of my own posts.
I didn’t count how many times I stumbled my own posts compared to other websites. But it took a while before I got the blank page.
What if I use SU to advertise one of my posts, would that help me get back in? Or maybe they won’t let me advertise either
Anyway, I will use SU to stumble other websites than my own for a while and maybe I will see traffic from SU again.
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.
There are a lot of fantastic comments here. There are almost too many to reply to. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I am compiling as much research as I can and comparing it with the anecdotal evidence presented here in the form of comments. It is clear to me that there is more to be discusses, so you can all look for another post on this issue soon.
I too am having problems with Stumbleupon. I’m getting reasonable stumble spikes but when I try and write a review for a post – even if it is not for GoodlifeZen, the page doesn’t load properly.
What oh what have I done??
I can attest to this.
One of my readers through me up on Stumble then I went back and added some specific articles. I got great traffic for one day. Then after submitting 4 articles in one sitting I have not seen any other stumble traffic.
Yes, I f=definitely think you are on to something. I went ahead and deleted my reviews of my site even though my Stumble screen name is completely different then my blog persona of The Movie Whore.
until days of research had gone by that I discovered a buried little paragraph deep down on one of the SU pages that mentioned the ratio of one domain to other stumbles being a factor and that if this ratio is tipped, SU prevents you from submitting any more from that domain and affects your entire traffic. No warning and no possible way of readjusting the ratio to repair the damage
What’s NOT a secret on SU is that people who use it for spammaliciousness will be summarily banned. This is no secret. No more than there is a domain limit on submissions. There is no cloak and dagger on SU. It’s very clear and up front. It’s only seemingly *cloak and dagger* and under a big *veil of mystery* when people try to subvert. They never bothered to read [the TOS] they *shouldn’t even try to subvert* so they then think everything’s a conspiracy. Hehe.
If you worry yourselves into a frenzy over what you’ve may’ve done wrong in order to cease getting traffic from SU, then you may be spamming the database and that’s a strong no. SU was NOT invented for MY traffic. It was not invented for YOURS. It was invented so people could share and collaborate on sites they liked.
I was a member way back before SEO saturation and commercialization so I understand this concept may be foreign to many of you. But think of it like YouTube. What if every video became a commercial promoting the submitters product? The only people who would stick around would be the submitters and in that, they would stick just to see OTHER submitters of video ads’ videos. In effect, they start spamming each other and the people to whom YouTube was originally intended has long gone. The only people left are the sellers and spammers. The buyers are now gone. YouTube has, thus, turned into a welfare state.
SU has strong controls in place, and getting stronger in preventing this.
PS> As for concerns of this ratio. Do you think SU is going to divulge its algorithm only to have spammers divert it? This is one of the many problems with spammers – or people TRYING to circumvent rules in place – they seem to underestimate everyone else.
Every time I submit my own post, I get a blank page. This has been happening for the last 2 or 3 days.
i’ve heard similar things from other people.
I don’t understand why SU bothers about self-promotion. People who continually submit their own content and nothing else, will never get a fan base.
Wouldn’t it be better if, rather than having a blank white screen appear, you got a message saying “It appears you are submitting this URL too many times. Please stop. Here are the rules of submission…” Or whatever.
I assumed that my computer was screwing up so I resubmitted the SAME URL over and over waiting for Stumbleupon to work on their end. UGH!!
By the way, over the months I wasn’t submitting my site’s homepage over and over, I was submitting different (new) entries every so often when they pertained to something in the news. So it didn’t really occur to me that from Stumbleupon’s end I was obnoxiously saying “look at me, look at me.” To me didn’t seem like I was simply spamming. I was simply planting one seed.
http://Animalinternet.com
Animals sharing their opinions
(See? THAT’S what an obnoxious plug looks like. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Ugh! And thanks for doing this legwork. I searched a dozen times last week and didn’t find this page. I then assumed I was getting white screen because we had changed our page titles and perhaps a rogue character encoding was causing a bug in the submission form.
I have to say I’ve only submitted about 10 links to the same domain and many of those were big hits with the SU crowd getting thumbed up and reviews.
Fortunately our SU traffic to those URLs didn’t taper off, but I easily wasted 2 hours debugging this problem assuming it was on my end. I’m hardly a spammer and I also submit other stuff, so my guess is the algo takes time frame into account too.
I’ve been getting blank pages to. Also after submitting my own posts. Now I’m gonna submit other websites for a while see what happens.
Wow. I have been guilty of stumbling my own blog to the point that I was getting the blank screen and could not stumble it any longer. I had no idea. Wish I’d read this first.
Jeff, you just stole my words… exactly my feelings
Thanks, y’all, for the answer to my blank submit page issue! THey really oughta put up some sort of message that tells you when you’re hit the over-stumble point. This info was hard to find. Thanks so much for having it!
Hmmm, looking at this from a malicious point of view… Someone could “hobble” a competing blog/website by submitting the competitors pages to SU until the “magic threshhold” is triggered.
This sounds scary… I wonder what SU can do to prevent this without “watering down” the effectivness of their current algorithm?
I figured some thing like this was going on – as I have noticed the same thing first hand. I have submitted my own content several times, and have seen my traffic dwindle recently.
I guess Ill have to lay off thumbing my own content for a while.
Thanks for your post.
It seems that because of the fact that my site is on a subdomain (of the free host 110mb.com) I have to be very careful to stumble some of the other subdomains.
I just ran into this myself. I was using SU to play with post titles and watch to associated results. My best title / post had 259 visitors and 400+ page views. Then they flicked the light switch. Traffic dropped tremendously.
Hopefully my SEO efforts will pay off at some point and work that has been put into social sites like blogcatalog will help to lift things. In the meantime I will be waiting for SU to lift the gate.
Rstanley.
Bah, I got the same blank screen. I wasn’t aware that submitting my own content over and over (different pages in the same domain) would be considered “spamming”. What if I’m posting interesting news? The whole thing sounds idiotic to me. So I’m saying Bye-bye to SU and hellow to Digg, Reddit, Twitter, heck, even Facebook!
I too am getting a blank page when I try to submit. I think it’s pretty lame, I had no idea I was violating any rules. The least they could do is change the blank page to a message explaining the situation.
“Playing Dead” is not a very professional way to deal with your users.
I also has the lame blank submit page.
It seems like one way to stop people using your service…
I know I will.
^ just to add….
I had a 500% drop in traffic after getting the blank submit page -_-
I have had my own problems with stumble and wrote an article about it. You can read it here:
http://www.webupon.com/Web-Talk/Stumbling-in-Bad-Taste.617053
I even wrote to stumble about it, but till date have not heard back from them.
Oh this explains so much!!!! Now I know why stumble does not respond sometimes. They don’t tell you that you can’t stumble your own stuff and tech support will not answer your inquiries. This REALLY PISSES ME OFF! I’m getting tons of traffic from others sources and think I may give stumble the boot. Really not fair (not that they ban self-promotion, but that they won’t tell you about it!)
I’ve been using stumbleupon for about five years and am linked to the oldest part of the community there. I can tell you, we “thumbs-down” alot when we see a bunch of self promoting from one site, all submitted by the owner. It just hits a sour note.. look at MY JUNK how cool it is, BUY MY STUFF, its just not that subtle. We want to see things tagged because they are interesting and entertaining, not because you want to sell it to us, so the community stomps it out. This is what has kept it useful and not just another Ad filled piece of crap for years. If your site is really interesting, a couple of submissions will get it noticed, and who knows maybe some of your friends will give it a thumbs up. Bombarding stumbleupon with your “hey look at me” marketing crap is .. not cool.
great post as usual!