I wonder if the nofollow tag prevents PR from being passed but the google bot still follows the link just to index a site.
It probably wont help with PR but I guess that its traffic you are after and the no follow doesn't matter to users.
I get a decent chunk of traffice from stumbleupon.com, yet when I go to the refer page and enter in the address, there's "no record" of the site It's been this way for at least a month
This is a related question - I've seen increased traffic coming from StumbleUpon but very little effect on the revenues of my sites. Has anyone seen better conversions (e.g. AdSense revenue) from StumbleUpon traffic?
internetguy - the vast majority of stumblers click 1-2 times per site. Once to hit the thumbs-up/thumbs-down (and for anything that's not 100% on-topic or humorous, it's usually the thumbs-down), then they hit the Stumble button. If your site requires scrolling, they won't scroll, they'll hit the Stumble button. In stats, stumblers don't look much different than a bot, unless they're stumbling a game, quiz, or movie.
Stumbleupon sometimes feels like nothing more than a glorified traffic exchange. My stats also show that most people that stumbleupon my sites don't stay for more than a few seconds or bother exploring deep into the site. Too bad because it seems like they make a huge effort to keep the traffic well targeted.
I don't see increased click throughs much either. In fact I suspect decreased click throughs. But since more and more pages of my site get stumbled - without me thumbing them up - I do think some people actually explore the site. Most people will just click the stumble button if they don't particularly care for a page. If they really don't like it they will give a thumbs down. If they like it, they will give a thumbs up. The traffic IS targeted. But its targeted in a way that is inevitably going to be only partially successful. I mean I have several interests listed. Let's take 'art'. I like artsy pictures and graphics, but only certain styles appeal to me. So roughly half of the stuff I stumble is my taste and the other half I don't like at all. Which is pretty good from my standpoint. After all - it takes no time at all to go to the next site. But from the webmasters standpoint it means that roughly 50% of the stumbleupon traffic isn't really interested in that site at all, despite being roughly targeted traffic. With art-sites this is more of an issue then with my mostly text-based site. All those pictures that need to load - could become a server problem. Same with webdesign. I am a webdesigner, but I'm not very techy about it. So any site that is in the 'gadgets' or 'php-resources' zone will get a thumbs down, because I don't want to see them when I stumble. But because I will inevitably also thumb up some sites related to webdesign I keep getting to see sites that are just a tad bit too technical for my taste. It's targeted, but not hairline specific.
StumbleUpon doesn't directly help with SERPs but it does indirectly by helping you get exposure and *hopefully* getting some natural links in the process. That said many people come and go quickly from site to site when using stumbleupon so I'm not sure exactly to what extend it does that...
Hi Anita, love your site, very funny. I'll take a look at Stumbledupon. I like to include a little humour in my articles, I've just written a hopefully humorous `fashion review' on my Working Photojournalist site about the kind of fancy dress people were wearing at the local (Skegness UK) new years eve celebrations. It's interesting how you got a good placement in the SERPs even though there's no meta in your url. I thought your site was about drugs. It makes me wonder whether the `meta in url' argument is relevant. So it's based on `plumbers crack' - a plumber inadvertently showing his bum when his pants droop. Interesting. Here in England we have a wider view of crack, we call it `builders bum', 'cause all the construction workers, not just plumbers, do it. French and Saunders, a comedy duo, did a really funny video clip about it a few years ago, and I think someone here once published a calendar featuring `award winning' builders bums. There's a few ideas for you!
Briefly, StumbleUpon is a social network which now has more than 1 million members, and which is different than other social sites I had met so far. You download and install a toolbar, then, when surfing the net, if you like a page and you want to share it with the community, you press the Thumb Up button on the toolbar, and the page goes into the StumbleUpon circuit, being shown to other members. On the toolbar, you also have the Stumble button, which, once pressed, shows you pages from other members. I signed in with StumbleUpon in the beginning of September. Almost 71% of my September traffic came from StumbleUpon! It is true that one of my posts made it to the Buzz! Section (a sort of Digg’s front page) and this generated a significant amount of traffic, not only in the few days when it was in the Buzz!, but even three months after that, I still see a lot of traffic coming to that page. In October, one of my posts got farked (some of you may know what this means for the traffic; I got about 20000 visitors in the first 10 hours or so, and there could have been more if the server had not crashed for a while). Although Fark accounted for 67% of October’s traffic, yet StumbleUpon had an honorable share of almost 18%. November was a normal month, as I did not have so much time to write new content for my blog, and StumbleUpon almost equals Google in the amount of traffic sent to the site (I get about 150-200 daily uniques from Google, the site being only 4 months old). The Stumble Upon traffic's conversion rate is less than half my usual one, but this traffic helps the blog to score better in text link advertising networks, so I see at least this indirect benefit of having my pages on SU.
Thanks for the detailed post scorpion68a. Any chance that you can also give us an idea of how well stumbleupon vs other traffic monetizes? If you happen to have that kind of data that is. I have received thousands of hits from stumbleupon over the last couple of months but only a couple have clicked on an ad.
Stumbleupon is good for reasonably targeted traffic to sites that offer good content. In most cases the content should not be too difficult, I think. Though one of the articles on my site that is a bit more scholarly also gets stumbled. I like that, unlike Digg and Netscape there is no competition going on really. If enough people interested in a certain topic thumb up your site (or rather, pages from it), it gets stumbled. That simple.