Just some thoughts and a few straw poll experiments. I would like to hear peoples thoughts on Digg/Stumble being used to gather PR/ incoming links and the quality meter. I guess the question is do sites like Stumble use a quality meter on their user base so for example if I post a link on DP and 100 DP members stumble that link - Assuming for sake of argument that all of these accounts are stumble ho's and stumbling whatever is requested, gambling, adult, make money fast etc..... since these accounts would regularly stumble what could be determined as 'spam' by a human reviewer (and hence by a smart machine) does that mean having wholesale stumble of my sites by accounts such as this adversly affect my ratings or flag my site. If I worked for SU/Digg that is how I would program it anyways. If this theorem is true, that means that if one wanted to build a quality campaign with SU on a site, then they would specificity NOT post their site in a forum like DP. thoughts?
You're basically right on that last point - Stumble is awesome for entertainment sites, or anything else that attracts people who are looking to kill time at work or at home. So, if you enter the right category and keywords, you can get some decent long-term visitors. I don't know about Digg since I've never used it, I was turned off to that site when I saw how so many posts have angry/racist/hateful comments on them.
markn26 - you had the exact same thought i had. a bunch of childish kids in digg that are far too obnoxious to bother with. i think that although some traffic may come over to your site from these social bookmarking sites, things will change soon enough, whatwith so many people offering diggs and stumbles from their 50 accounts. that's just plain madness and someone will soon catch on to them, and get them banned. question is, what will happen to all those bookmarks these mega-bookmarkers made? will they get penalized too. i wont be too surprised if the sites these mega-bookmarkers have bookmarked get the full ban too. then the party is over. if you want to get your site bookmarked, steer clear of anyone offering multiple accounts in digg/stumble/etc.
that pretty much sums up my feeling. On my sites that would never get stumbled by any 'real' people - ie.. they are gateway sites for PPC or whatever -i dont think it can hurt to have 100's of pimped our stumbles however on any site that offers interesting content and would have a chance for the organic user to find it useful - then I would be wary of SU Exchanges etc... I know because we are working right now on a social media/indexing platform and are writing into the code to cross reference all sites suggested by a known spammer and flag them. Then to flag all the other users who suggested this same site. so we would essentially have a huge spider web like internal blacklist that would cross people can be applied to filter spam quickly. Example - if USER1 suggests SPAMsite1 and USER2 also '"stumbles" that site then USER2 is also flagged as a spammer and everything else they 'stumble' will immeaditly be flagged as SPAMsite2 - also when USER3 comes and 'stumbles' SPAMsite3 then USER3 gets marked as a spammer now we would not shoot spammers on site, let them continue, but we are applying a 'Karma' rating to the weight of a users recommendation. This will be an internal variable ie...a user with high Karma who Stumbles a site will give that site 10x more weight and points than a noob who stumbles it. Also being caught in the spam web wont immeaditily kill a USER or SITE, but we can cross refrence the data to see if it is more than an accident. ie.... IF SPAMuser suggest SITE then FLAGCODE = (+1) When FLAGCODE > 5 then SITE = SPAM
In that case i'll want to know about your site. it sounds really promising. good luck with your venture and remember to let me know about it. Thanks .
So using any kind of financial incentive or link based incentive to get a group of users on a forum to stumble a blog-specific page such as finance would be a bad idea? I'm considering a tactic such as this.. but if it's the smart viewer concept then I could just get my entire office (16 people) to regularly stumble and bookmark finance related blogs / sites, and then stumble/bookmark the new things i need them to once a week?
I think that if pages within your site are regularly bookmarked by the same people, a red flag may start to blow in the wind. The idea is to find incentives to get your site visitors to bookmark your pages, rather than concentrating on a "usual" group to "regularly" bookmark your site's pages. .
Just assume that the people that made SU are just as smart or smarter than us and dont want spam in their system Actually if somebody really wanted to game SU - then they would set up scripts to not just stumble their sites, but set it up to replicate actual user behavior- I think SU looks at this sort of thing IE. if a user signs up and automatically marks a spam site with their first stumble, then they know something is up The script would look something like this 1 - sign up 1000 accounts - better to use different IP's and scatter the signups 2 - each account would use the stumble toolbar and approve, dissapporve or give no preference on random sites. set the screipt to do this every few days for a few weeks. by doing this the user becomes 'verfied' in the SU database and is given 'worth.' 3 - At this point a site they submit will have value and climb in the rankings further. 4- The gamer can then use all the game accounts to cross stumble all of the submitted sites. 5- I am also sure that if you come across the site using the SU toolbar and approve - then this approve gives much more weight than if you punch in the URL and approve. so can set script to SU all day in a single category and catch when one of your sites come up this way you can trick the SU system into pumping up your site and it will get lots of traffic until too many people mark it as crap (unless it is actually interesting) at which point all of your accounts will be compromised and marked as Spammers and need to rinse wash and repeat in order to protect against it, got to know how to break it
I found a service that would do this for you. They had all these different people that would bookmark or stumble your site. Whatever you wanted basically. It worked, I only ordered 50 though.
this was probably asked a million times, but does anyone know how/why DigitalPoint got banned from Stumbleupon?
yeah, i mess around trying to figure out SU (i wouldnt mind starting the same gig). A LOT of the freebie section people are already marked as a spammer and they don't know it. About 80% of them won't bring you any new traffiic, but if you keep up with a personal account you can see the different. SU is great for entertainment links... not a real estate or an online dating article/landing page. not to sure about digg, from my exp... last PR update one of my sites went to a PR3 from only digg linking. I saw hardly (maybe 40 uniques) any traffic.
Digg has been bringing me a decent amount of traffic but StumbleUpon not as much and my site falls under entertainment I would think. Digg helps me out quiet a bit, I'd stick with them