Do you stumble your own pages? I admit that I did few times when I signed up with StumbleUpOn. After reading their terms, I realized that is not a good idea. I have not stumbled on my own page since. What I also realized is that your StumbleUpOn account may be banned by stumble the pages under the same domains too many times. You heard it right. You are so kind to your friend. So you decide to do your friend a favor and stumble (the first one to discover) all your friend’s pages under the same domain. The domain may be banned by StumbleUpOn eventually. In other words, no one can ever discover the page on the domain again. Your account may also be banned shortly. So how do you become a good stumbler without hurting your own effort and your friends site?
So what is the consequence?
Let’s say that you are a great stumbler and you have pretty good score. So you discover a new page. You thumb up and write a decent review about the page. Suddenly, you are bring in the attention to the pages. All your friends on StumbleUpOn start receiving the page when they stumbling. They like the page, so they thumbs up and write a review. So more and more stumblers gave the thumb up. Now. The page is getting tremendous traffic that it was not getting ever before.
You did the same thing to other pages under the same site. It consequently brings in more traffic in the very short time frame. You are happy and your friend are happy. So you two have a great night sleep.
Few days later, your friend receive a letter from Google AdSense team claiming that your friend’s site was creating click fraud. Boom! Your fiends AdSense account is banned. Your friend is trying to explain the situation to Google AdSense with no luck. No response. So your friends un-paid check is sitting in Google’s bank account.
What was happening? Your kindness is sending too much traffic to your friend’s site. The story here might be too scary, but it is pretty close to the reality.
Now few more days later, you tried to discover a new page of your friends. You can’t. The StumbleUpOn toolbar just open a new blank window that has one “Cancel Rating” button. You know you are no longer to discover the pages on that site. If you continue do the same thing over and over again, you will find your account banned some days.
I am not trying to scare you. It just doesn’t make sense to send huge traffic without knowing the consequence.
Extra reading about the consequence: Stumbleupon can get your AdSense Account Banned for Invalid Impressions Fraud
What is your thought? Do you discover a lot of pages on the same domain name, which is not even your domain?
@SEO Strategies:
Thank you for stopping by. I don’t know if StumbleUpOn will limited the number of pages you can stumble on one domain. It makes no sense to limited that. However, I do believe that the staffs over StumbleUpOn are closely watching who stumble the page. If you discover new pages too frequently on the same domain (regardless yours or others), your account and domain may be locked.
They do limit it and then encourage you to buy ads to promote your site as an alternative.
any hand editing would have to make up a small part of this type of regulation, i would imagine it is automated for the most part.
@SEO Strategies:
It still not maks too much sense to me. If your page were discovered by hundred members, it means your web site is popular and already got decent traffic. Why would you buy Ads? I think it only happens when are trying to stumble your own low traffic page too often.
My personal experience with stumbleUpOn is the traffic is only short term. You will build your readership only if your content is good enough. Most of my traffic are from search engine. Most of the StumbleUpOn traffic won’t stay on a page for more than 10 seconds. So if you are rely on StubmleUpOn to increase your sales on your web site, you will be disappointed.
I think StumbleUpOn is watching what people are doing. I can tell that by dig into my web log.
The limit is in place for obvious reasons and it does in fact exist. I hit the limit with my own domain, with somewhere around 10 submissions. There are exceptions in place for certain high traffic domains. The reason for the limit is to prevent spammers from submitting 100s of pages from the same domain to the StumbleUpon system. Why? If it was full of spam pages no one would use it. That is why the limit exists.
So you have a new site, you’ve submitted your pages to stumbleupon but it’s not generating the amount of traffic you desire…an option is to purchase a certain number of stumbles to your site. Not all the pages you hit are submitted by users…some are paid placement.
As for them watching, again, I am quite certain it is mostly automated. Manpower is expensive and I doubt they are monitoring submissions manually, except in certain circumstances beyond the capabilities of the monitoring application. An example would be a network of people working together on separate accounts to manipulate certain pages to show up more…that might be the type of things the people at stumbleupon spend their time monitoring. Of course this last paragraph is 100% conjecture…the rest I know to be true.
@SEO Strategies:
I think the limitation has something to do with the thumb down. I am not the programmer at StumbleUpOn, so I can say it’s not limited. However, I do know that if there are too many pages from the same site submitted in a short time frame, it will raise the alert.
If the page has over certain amount (My guess is 5%) thumb down, it will stop sending the page to other to stumble prior a human to check. I just thought if you stumble the right way, you should not have any troubles to receive traffic from StumbleUpOn.
I am just hoping that the traffic will last longer. I am still getting some traffic to few of my very old post. That’s great!
You may be right about the thumbs down.
@SEO Strategies:
Yea. I do know some site with too many thumb down will be blocked.
I was wanting to kickstart my own blog using SU, but after eading all this I think better not do it. Thanks for the tips.
@Huge Mistakes:
If you Stumble the right way, it will be you huge traffic. Just be a good stumbler to get started. Thank you for visiting!
Good to know, I guess it’s only fair to those that create quality content and don’t know all the ins and outs of social bookmarking, One should be able to kick back and let organic searches rule. Great post.
@Flash Blog:
Hope you enjoy the traffic from stumbleUpOn. Thank you for stopping by.
I was banned from Stumble Upon for stumbling my own blog posts. It is ok if you pay them for the premium stumbling that they offer for a fee but not with the free service. I got a lot of traffic from stumbles but it never amounted to much as far as conversion.
Oh well, that is what happens when they become to large.
@Tom:
I am sorry that you was banned by StumbleUpOn. That’s a lessen to learn. StumbleUpOn has been a great traffic source for my blogs, but the conversion rate from the StumbleUpOn traffic is low in many cases. I will never buy the traffic for sites with PPC advertisement, it will actually lower your PPC rate. Most stumbler won’t even click on any of the links.
I just got banned from stumble upon, was looking for the reason and reached your post. I was also not getting any conversion from stumble upon traffic but the surge in traffic that one can get from stumble upon is a steep one and i feel like i have missed it from now on. Are there any nice and free alternatives?
I infact didn’t know that they had it in thier TOS.
Thanks Terence. I have been looking for the reason why being banned by Stumble Upon. At first I thought unreasonably banned I was trying to look for the answer in Google. I found a lot of pages containing Problogger( ya we know him well ) but he was just talking about his site being banned bla bla bla..Anyway, wish you smooth sailing in your way to being a billionaire. Cheerz!
@1 Weddings Readings:
Thank you for the blessing. Problogger has more power to prove that his should not be banned. Not so much luck to other small web site owners. However, StumbleUpOn only provides a short boost of traffic and not a good quality traffic. You should pay more attention on search engine traffic. If you can make to the top of first page for your niche keywords, you don’t really need StumbleUpOn for traffic.
I didnt knew this before. I used to write reviews for my own site. But, I am not able to do this now. It seems they have banned by site. Feeling very bad. I never expected this.