Friday, September 08, 2006

[Ranking and Search Engines] StumbleUpon.com?

I'm wondering if anyone else has been assaulted by stumbleupon.com. Yesterday, I saw a huge spike in traffic and found that it was all coming from that site. Apparently it is a blog surfing tool that lets members "stumble upon" random blogs and then rank them or comment on them. However, I think the whole thing might be a vehicle to sell bloggers a service where stumbleupon claims to drive receptive web surfers to your site by creating a "campaign." I don't know how my blog got on their radar, but it has been quite annoying. I don't think any of those hits are coming from genuine people. Has anyone else run into this? I'm hoping it will just stop if I don't do anything. Thanks in advance!

This Post was written by Julie from A Mingling of Tastes.


8 comments:

Susan Voisin said...

It happened to me too, and it eventually stopped, but it lasted at least a month. I'm with you--I think it's a big scam to sell their service. I was able to ignore them after a while.

Anonymous said...

stumble upon is great - i use it for random surfing and have used it for quite some time. We even have a stumble upon button in our toolbar.
it's really fun for random finding stuff on the web.

If you get a spike of visitors from them, or get on their radar, it probably means one of the stumble referers (a normall web browser like you or me) has liked and recommended one of your web pages.

as far as I have experienced they only try and sell you ad space when you are on your stats page and click on the link to them as a referrer - in that case then a page comes up to sell 'advertising' as you have noted.

I fail to see how this cn be annoying? If you don't clink on the referral link (once is enough - now you know where it goes), you wont see this page again.

If you are getting emails from them hassling you then that would be news to me, however, and I would agree that sounds wrong.

Anonymous said...

Count me in the "Pro" Stumble Upon camp. I've gotten a fair amount of regular readers from their service.

Cybele said...

I have a friend at work who found my blog thru SU. I don't think it's a scam, just a different take on the Digg/Delicious thing of social ranking of sites.

I enjoy the traffic and sometimes find new readers through it.

I wish there was a way to track back to the rankings and comments to know what they're saying.

Ziz said...

As far as I've seen on SU -- they never pressure you to buy a pro account or have sent any emails to me whatsoever. So I'm confused as well as to why more traffic to your page would be a bad thing?

Most likely, someone enjoyed your page enough to add it to the SU database -- which I would take as a compliment rather than an annoyance.

I love wasting time using SU. It brings in a lot of readers that wouldn't normally visit. I would never think that was a bad thing personally.

Ilva said...

I like when someone put me up on stumble, it happens now and then and I take it as a compliment that someone likes something I have done and wants to share it with others! I have never ever had any problems with ads etc! So be happy!

Susan Voisin said...

Since so many of you like it, I'll have to give it a chance. All I saw of it was the page that comes up when you click on the "comes from" link in StatCounter, so my first impression of it was as a site that was trying to sell me something. I figured the hits were real, but it annoyed me that I was unable to get more info about the vistors. I'm just anal that way.

Julie said...

Thanks for the info, everyone. I had never seen this before, and assumed it was a totally commericial enterprise. Glad to know it can be a good resource.