Apparently, bad stumbles are good!

I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but, well here it goes.

A certain website of mine got stumbled by some visitor. My stats showed that I received 48 visitors from stumbleupon that day. Not bad, considering I get about 1200 a day. After that, the next day, no visits from SU.

Anyways, 2 days later, someone had thumbed down my website, stating that "that type of websites are too common on SU" (although I haven't seen any, but, you know, whatever...) and less than 20 minutes from that "thumbs down" (according to my stats, and the time the stumble was made) I had gotten a nice 700 visitors in about an hour or two.

So, apparently, bad stumbles - are good stumbles

 

I Stumble all my posts and never bothered looking into thumbs up or down. I only know that Stumble drives a lot of traffic, but they seldom stay long.

 

For some reason, using StumbleUpon doesn't work on any of my site's pages anymore...

 

That's exactly your problem. Don't stumble all your posts.

Stumbleupon has a complicated algorithm. Much like Diggs, power users (stumblers with lots of mutual friends, time on SU, their SU blogs, people whose discoveries turn into lots of thumbs up, etc...) have more power than us regular stumblers.

So, the algorithm also looks for other things to keep spam to the minimum, etc. One of them is people who constantly discover or stumble pages from the same website over and over again.

this means that each time you stumble your own website, the less powerful the stumble is.

A good way to prevent this is to create mutual friends in SU, add them to your MSN or whatever, have friends online or offline who use SU, and ask them to stumble your pages.

This way, SU will think they are natural stumbles, and more traffic will come your way.

 

lol negative marketing sometimes is good marketing indeed.

 

I dont use stumpleupon, should I?

 

^If you want to. I didn't really get anything out of it. I'd say Digg would be better.

I see you. To see a rise in traffic/hits is always fun and great to see when you're reviewing your stats (esp. when its unexpected) but it doesn't really mean anything in the long term if you won't get many returning visitors.

 

Its a lot better Than digg, I think

 

It depends. SU is more for viral content, interesting stuff, etc.

If you have, say, a blog about business and marketing, SU is definitely not the way to go.

If you have a movies blog, then it's different.

 

SU traffic doesn't last very long. I used to use them when they were allowed on DP

 

You get stumbles from both thumbs up and thumbs down. I got over 10,000 stumbles in a day over a controversy I wrote about connected to religion. It did nothing for my earnings and only increased my bandwidth usage. It is useless traffic that means nothing. Since I quit using them, I have less traffic and more earnings.

 

Interesting theory, though I believe that the negative thumbs up didn't have as much to do with it as the review given. Reviews seem to have value as well at SU. I'd like to address a few other points brought up in the comments as well:

First off, stumbling every single post on your site gets you banned. To get unbanned, just be an active user and don't thumbs up your site for a while - here's a more detailed post on getting unbanned from stumbleupon.

Second of all, I believe that Stumbleupon devalues inorganic thumbs ups that occur within a set period of time after a site is submitted. Check the link for more info.

 

This could actually be legit. I bet the algorithm has it so that once in a while a bad stumble is good, since no one will fake a bad stumble. Ohh..not any longer.

 

lol, yeah. I mean, it makes sense that stumbleupon would drive traffic to a thumbed down website, because it's a social network, and people are supposed to agree/disagree with each other