Social Bookmarking Can Kill Your StumbleUpon Traffic!

Woo-hoo! Lucky me for never checking those big names if I use social marker :)

I had no idea. Interesting info. Stumbled. :)

I’ve never made use of automated submission tools. I prefer submitting everything manually. I know this is time-consuming, but at least it’s a safer practice.

Anyway, your article is a welcome and necessary alert, because many bloggers submit everything they can (although they shouldn’t) without realising the mistake they’re making.

Wow Caroline,
I have to say, I’ve been following you since last years 30DC and you’re really getting good at what you do. And your blog is so unique! I’d say 95% of IM blogs out there are simply people rehashing what other people are saying. You, on the other hand, almost always provide me with something totally different from the crowd. It’ll keep me coming back, this is important stuff to know.

My best,

Mike

Interesting observation. As a fan of using Stumbleupon to find interesting content I am glad that they have some defences against spammers. I hope your course isn’t going to lead to a load of internet marketers putting their stuff on my screen when I am enjoying a stumble.

Colins last blog post..Creme de la Mer - Review

Nice post Caroline.
I sometimes stumble my own posts, but only stuff I know will do well. Its important to show that you use the service for other reasons as well. I do my best to be the first to discover quality pages and spend a fair amount of time actively stumbling across stuff that won’t benefit me.

Did you see the post by Danny over at SEOMoz recently where he talked about the algorithms used by Digg, SU, and Reddit?

Here is the algorithm he put out for SU:

Formula:

(Initial stumbler audience / # domain) + ((% stumbler audience / # domain) + organic bonus – nonfriend) – (% stumbler audience + organic bonus) + N

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I sort of agree to that…. there is certainly a difference between delicious and stumbleupon… and you ahve to treat them differently..

Also using automated posting tools are easy bait but they neglect the effect of quality bookmarking as i call it. And thus i prefer to manually bookmark my posts.

regards
thinkjayant @ smartblogtips

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This is a great post. You are so right that Stumble Upon is a sensitive beast and one should stumble sites with caution. Teaching Internet Marketers to distinguish between social bookmarking and content sharing is one thing. Understanding how to use both to increase traffic to one’s site without abusing the use of the content sharing sites is another thing, and is paramount to successfully using Web2.0 properly to promote one’s business.

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Caroline, you seem to be giving stuff away again. 10 free lessons? I understand that offering something for free is a good way of demonstrating the value of what you have to offer. But you already have a whole website of good content to demonstrate that. I am not particularly interested in the particular offering as it happens, but if I were I would have been quite happy to pay for it.

Colins last blog post..I had thought it was all about traffic?

Hi Caroline,

I am aware of StumbleUpon’s benefits as a traffic generating tool but as a relatively new user, I have not seen much traffic yet.

I will spend more time reading your blog to understand the intricacies behind this system and I am glad to take away a lesson today - not to stumble my own posts.

Jeff

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Hi Caroline
that’s a great point and you and I have known for years now that REPUTATION of the markers has a major effect on the impact of each recommendation as well. I don’t just mean the vote leaders (those with their own following) I mean a factor which puts your (one) recommendation in front of people or not.
A reviewer quality score I like to call it.

As well as the services you mention, there are several grey hat “services” that also perform bookmarking and voting, Three ore have come out this month. They are pseudo intelligent and do it from multiple (fake) accounts and over time. BUT of course they have no concept of QUALITY or taste.

Another major factor becoming apparent is that of the CHARACTER of each service. AYK this is how each Web 2.0 property is DIFFERENTIATING themselves from each other. So each platform has a unique demographic.

For instance AYK StumbleUpon users are a very specific breed of user. So people who use that service expect a certain style of content and recommendations.

So as you say, these are 2 major reasons why BLANKET bookmarking (automated or manual) is not a great idea.

1) The reviewers score
and
2) The style requirements of each platform.

Great point!
I hope people heed your warning, because these grey hat systems and mindless blanket marking, will ultimately devalue the entire ecology of the concept.

You and I have seen it time and time again.

Once something become spammy, or irrelevant, or not of quality, people are fast to move on. And sadly gurus highlight the FADs without explaining what the etiquette is. Gate crashers spoil the party for everyone. And many IM people are basically looking for a party to crash. The wasp in the beehive.

Wouldn’t it be great if people could exert their own quality control? You’ve just helped with this post, but I can’t see it changing the basic problem. That’s why future systems will become more heavily policed and why things like reviewers reputation will feature strongly in the indexing algorithms.

Peter

Peters last blog post..John Reese to laugh or to cry on Folder 2 point OH

Peter makes some good points. I am a fan of Stumbleupon as a user because it finds me things that interest me that I wouldn’t otherwise know about. I would hate it if IMers mucked it up.

Colins last blog post..I had thought it was all about traffic?

@Colin, no throughout the course I constantly emphasise the importance of submitting only good content. The thing with StumbleUpon is that their anti-spam mechanisms are quite good and if somebody tries to abuse the system their account wont last long at all.

@JB, no I haven’t seen that particular post.

@Colin, when I first came up with the idea of the project I thought it was just going to be a handful of quick emails so I didn’t think of charging and then the concept grew from there so I decided to charge for half of it. Had I planned the project out more fully from the beginning there probably wouldn’t be 10 free lessons :-)

@jeflin, I’m not advocating that you don’t stumble your own posts!! I go into this very topic in some detail in the course. The point is not to auto-submit *every* post on your site - there is a distinct difference. When you carefully submit a well-written, value-packed post from a well-established profile you can get a lot of traffic.

@Peter, yeah the reviewer quality score is the reason why most submissions to bookmarking / social news sites cannot be automated. However, in my post in which I list do-follow bookmarking sites I am careful there to only include sites that don’t have that component. But yes I agree that as soon as something proves valuable in some way, there will be people that want to automate it, speed it up, mass-use it, abuse it, exploit it and so on. So far I think StumbleUpon has done a pretty good job of combatting it though.

Although you won’t see the highest quality traffic, if you harness the power of social bookmarking, I guarantee you can gain incoming links from SU (StumbleUpon) users who choose to link to your post on their own sites, and some pay-per-click bucks.

So how do we create content pages we can almost guarantee will be popular?

The social bookmarking world isn’t a lazy man’s (or woman’s) game even though all you need to do for your page to get listed is submit it at the click of a button.

Pages that you and others submit to these sites have to be
1) of immense value, or
2) of rare information.

Take a look through pages linked at a major social site and you’ll see they are often lengthy and contain info you don’t see everywhere else on the net for free.

What does this say about creating a content page solely for social bookmarking sites?

Well, a good rule of thumb is to shoot for publishing pages that are at least 3 times more valuable than the pages already bookmarked at social sites.

Put so much value into your page that it would have an actual cash value, being worth as much as a report or e-book. Information should be dense, rare, and interesting.

In some cases you can get away with a short, interesting post, but I guarantee it won’t stay popular for long. It will be buried.

Read my full post on social bookmarking:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/day-17-social-bookmarking/

Nick Stewarts last blog post..Day 20: Blogging

Caroline,

I just want to say thank you. I have had great success using your ebook on Wordpress sites. It has opened up a whole world for me since I can easily start a blog or website and have control over how it looks and feels.

I am looking forward to your Stumble Rush product. I am sure it willl be fantastic. You are well on your way to creating and empire.

Brian

Brian Monahans last blog post..Let Me Hear Your Trees!

@Nick, in this context I consider social bookmarking and StumbleUpon to be entirely different beasts. I think of bookmarking as purely a link building process where content quality is no where near as important as for a site with a voting element such as SU. You dont need outstanding content to get a backlink from bookmarking sites because these are just your own personal bookmarks. Of course if you want traffic, that’s a different matter!

@Brian, hehe thanks though I’m not too sure about the empire part :)

I never really bookmark my articles in SU as SU posts don’t really rank high in the search engines. And even if you do want to bookmark everything in SU, start a new profile, don’t use the one you regularly use.

Thanks Caroline, yet another great article! I originally found your article ‘do-follow social bookmarking sites’ through Google.

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Caroline, I wanted to let you know you are wrong about Furl. Look at this URL and then look at the code, there is no nofollow in the link. http://www.furl.net/url/12545048

The incoming link to the page in furl is from the Furl homepage and is a direct link in an a tag, that a search engine can follow.

Also, social bookmarking software and submitting everyone of your posts is a good way for Google to downgrade all your listings.

@Karen Zara you are very right to submit all your own articles by hand and not to use SocialMarker. Just because a few gurus suggest using automated submitters does not make it the right way to do things. Have you noticed that these same Gurus SELL automated submitters? What could their motivation be there?

For those of you who have been around on the Internet longer than a few years, do you remember FFA submitters and search submission tools of 10 years ago. Same stuff here.

You should read my latest post on my site about social bookmarking spam if CommentLuv does not pick it up.

This is not blatant self promotion here Caroline, this is honest help from someone who knows this is the wrong road to go down from a social bookmarking expert.

Chris Langs last blog post..Social Bookmarking Spam - Will it Hurt You in Google?

@Chris, I’ll take another look at Furl when I next do an update of that post. I think that social bookmarking can be a good method of building backlinks. The two services mentioned are free web tools and not paid software. Google may penalise you if you go crazy with the backlinks but if you are using sites like these to speed up the process of something you would ordinarily do manually then imo that is a useful tool.

Caroline, don’t get me wrong, I advocate using social bookmarking sites to create backlinks to your site.

I have found 15 sites so far that Google will follow back to your site and return a backlink in Google results that have high traffic and return high quality backlinks to Google.

However, think about this: If Digg has 5 million users and the average number of posts, from the Digg top 100 to the user who no longer participates is 1 post per day, that is 5 million posts.

How can you possibly expect that Google will see your 1 link in Digg in 5 million others as a backlink to your site. In fact if you submit your site to Digg and no one else Diggs it, I have come to feel that is a negative indicator in Google’s eyes. The worst thing you can do is submit your Digg posts yourself and then get no Diggs.

One of my friends on Social Marketing Central wrote an article that went hot on the Internet. He got like 1500 visitors in a few days and 80 comments. The bad news is that he only got 18 Diggs. Now tell me this: Don’t you think that Google, that has access to the popularity of posts on Digg just like we do, would not see 1500 visitors and 18 Diggs a negative indicator of this blog and the blog post itself?

It takes 50+ Diggs before Google sees your backlink as valuable.

How does Google know how many visitors you got?

We tell them by using Google Analytics.

How does Google know how many Diggs or votes on any site we got?

They are links in social profiles of the other users that voted on us. We all know that Google can follow links.

I can easily get 100 to 200 Diggs for any article I want in Digg in 2 days. I do that through my own strategies and participation. I also do not abuse that power.

So social bookmarking if done wrong can actually hurt you. Social marketing is about being social, so be social on social bookmarking sites, don’t just submit you own content and expect that this will bring you results.

Participation, diverse quality content and large friend lists that rate your posts highly are the key here.

@Chris, I don’t include Digg in my social bookmarking activities. I dont even see Digg as a bookmarking site as all and this is a point that I have tried to explain on this blog many times and failed! I have a follow up post tonight which will hopefully explain my viewpoint on this easier a little clearer.

One thing that I do want to warn you about is that Internet marketing articles do not do well on Digg. However, Digg does return the most valuable of all the social sites backlinks.

I also theorize that Digg is going to be bought my Google and integrated in Google results. Maybe only in News, maybe only in Blogsearch.

I will go out on a limb and saw it off here by saying I expect to see “digg this” buttons in Google results right next to our listings.

Many Google results are old and irrelevant, they need to do something and I believe that will be, becoming the first social search engine.

I would rather see Microsoft buy Digg and do the same thing, but I have a feeling they would frak (bsg reference) it up somehow.

Also, take a look at my latest post if commentluv picks it up about how social bookmarking submitters are the new FFA submission software.

Chris Langs last blog post..Don’t Use Social Bookmarking Submission Software

Most of these social sites depend on participation of real human beings to function properly. I can’t say it better than you, but certainly it is true.

Social bookmarking is not a place to get inbound links. At least it was not designed as such.

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I agree, I practice 100% whitehat tactics, Google said it best in their Webmaster Guidlines….

# Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

# Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

# Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Need I say more?

@Chris, yes I agree, Digg users hate IMers and SEO’s.

@Hendry, read the post after this one - it should clarify the difference between pure bookmarking sites and those that require the social element.

I prefer submit manually for all SB site.

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Well put, Caroline, and oh so true… Stumbled and Sphunn ;)

I agree about digg when it comes to internet marketers… doesn’t quite get the same flow of traffic… that has been my experience… i use digg to find blogs to comment on

Hi Caroline!

Thanks for this article, I am just starting on the Social Bookmark scene and it has clued me up nicely.

Caroline,

If when I opened my Stumble Upon account I was taking the 30 day challenge and was still learning the site and stumbled a bunch of Squidoo pages that were removed from my stumbles, should I be concerned my account has been flagged.

I don’t do anything out of the ordinary now and understand how to use it. I have had an occasional squidoo page taken out of my stumbles.

should I create a new account or just stick with it.

brian

Brian Monahans last blog post..Clean Sweep - Building Momentum

@Brian, hmm yeah unfortunately the 30DC teaches us to stumble everything. However I think you will be fine because there are two ways in which this can be a problem - getting your account banned, which obviously you haven’t, and getting the domain that you have over-stumbled blacklisted. If you’ve been stumbling Squidoo pages and not your own domain then that shouldn’t be a problem either.

In other words, StumbleUpon encourages people to submit more junk so it will show more balance in their account and they won’t be accused of promoting their own stuff. And what if I was adding someone to my follow list because I like THEIR stuff???

Frank Leverts last blog post..The 2008 Search Engine Strategies (SES) Awards Meaningful?

@Frank, if you submit junk to SU you’ll get thumbed down, simple as that. The SU community is not at all tolerant of junk and only good content will do well which is precisely why automated submission to it should be avoided.

@Frank Levert,

Why would you want to submit junk? If you submit tons of junk why would I bother reading your links if mostly they were comprised of junk?

Why would I read your email newsletter if it was mostly junk?

Why would I read your blog if it was mostly junk.

Why would I friend you on ANY social network if you mostly posted junk?

Why would I think your own submissions were not junk because of the junk company they keep?

Anyone reading this, how can you possibly still think after all the content people like Caroline and I have written that social networks are ways of promoting your own content?