Photo By: NightRPStar
A while back we were mystified by the results we found with our tests of Stumbleupon. We’ve since concluded that our results stemmed from Stumbleupon’s advanced utilities to prevent people from “Stumbling” their own content. The question that arises in my mind is:
Why Have Functionality To Prevent People From Stumbling Their Own Content?
So clearly Stumbleupon identified that the same group of people Stumbled our first and second submissions, so they didn’t show it to many, or maybe even any, other people. The pivotal question is: why? Why are they so concerned with preventing people from Stumbling their own work. Isn’t the whole point of their service that people in the aggregate decide if the content is worthwhile? If I submit several pieces of content and they aren’t any good, they shouldn’t go very far. Perhaps they should have spent less time discouraging self-submission, and more time making their promotion algorithm more advanced?
What’s Better About Digg?
It should first be noted that both Stumbleupon and Digg suffer from the same downfall, users who have ADD. Stumblers or Diggers might read your article, but the potential for them to become avid readers of your blog is pretty low. If they got their entertainment from reading just a few blogs they wouldn’t be on those services in the first place.
So why use either? Here’s a simple experiment. Go Digg one of your deep pages and wait a few weeks. Then search for the title of the article. There’s a good chance that the Digg page will outrank your original article. Moreover, in that Digg page, there is a Do-Follow link to your original article. While it kind of sucks that it’s outranking our article, if you could get some more inbound links from elsewhere you’d be moving.
Is This Another Anti-NoFollow Rant?
I will spare you the “nofollow” rant today. Everyone should know my feelings about “nofollow” by now. Instead I will convey an interesting anecdote about Digging your own pages. During my article marketing test I wrote an article titled “Learn To Read Stock Market Quotes.” If you search for it, my article currently shows up as results 2-4. Your milage may vary. Not long ago a spam blog “syndicated the story” (stripping the link back to me as spam blogs are wont to do) and dug it. The digg page ranked 5th and the spam blog was nowhere to be seen. So you can see that there is some benefit to be had by digging your own story.
Secondarily, your Digg profile can also have dofollow links back to your sites. So they actually reward you for participating in their community (a lost concept these days.) They also do not frown on submitting your own story, although you’ll usually do better if someone else submits it. While Digg has it’s own set of problems, it is vastly superior to Stumbleupon for promoting your work.
2 responses so far ↓
What a well written post. I’ve always found that through StumbleUpon I can get easier traffic (ie. more traffic with less work), and have thus prefered it to Digg when doing self promotion. For instance, when I first started soLinkable I had a random person stumble it, and that resulted in over 700 hits in about an hour. While the traffic did slow eventually, I still saw numerous visitors for a few days afterwards. In fact, I still get the occasional stumble (about 15 or so a month) to my main page.
Yeah. I think it’s pretty well agreed that having a page “Stumbled” usually results in more visitors than having a page “Dugg,” even if you get promoted to the same page. However at the end of the day I think neither one really converts to “readers” very often so I’d rather have the link helping my SERP in the long run. There are also TONS more variables, like type of content, etc., but I’d rather have the guaranteed return.
Leave a Comment