Sorry if I misunderstood you – it seems I should have read your article a bit more closely.

My only point is that first and foremost one should concentrate on writing high quality, valuable content and then on figuring out how to market that content.

In particular, I think people need to be careful when they start producing their content for marketing purposes. Obviously one needs to be aware of traffic and other marketing issues when one creates their content, but they just need to make sure that content comes first (IMHO). This is particularly true given that there are a numerous ways to market a site – since we have other options there is no reason to sacrifice the quality of one’s article or post for marketing purposes.

I agree, by the way, that when done well it’s a win-win situation. I’d even add one more benefit — if done well quality outbound links can lead to partnership opportunities if someone notices that you are linking to you and decide to contact you as a result.

Again, my apologies for not reading your post more carefully.

All the best,

Moshe

Moshe’s last blog post..What is Social Bookmarking (or why is del.icio.us so yummy)?

Nothing I write about on this blog is about gimmicks.

You should link to other people because there is a value in doing so. You want your content to be top quality and your marketing strategy to revolve around that. Creating post with meaningless or pointless links undermines that value IMHO.

Be well,

Moshe

But, better late than never right Caroline?

By the way, nice blog though.

Especially it makes the whole issue of “Link to People Who Use StumbleUpon” makes it shaky, as how you get to know everyone so well before investing time for linking / and giving a thumbs up.

Interesting post anyway , and I did gave you a thumbs up. :)

Keep stumbling good posts and pages just think would you want to read it again? that’s my bench mark I rarely thumb down things but I do try to thumb up things that I genuinely like.

So while your thumbs may be reduced for that site, your audience score will have increased so the effect is limited.

But
If you keep thumbing up the same site and nobody else thumbs it up then your audience score is not increasing but the stumbles are reducing each time.

So to answer yes your thumbs are being reduced its part of a balance within the algorithm to stop spammers completely taking control

That’s kinda silly. There are several blogs that I read that repeatedly post great content that I stumble, and that’s natural. It would be a shame if that was discounted over time.