Do You Trade Stumbles? You Could Be In Trouble.

September 14th, 2007

One of the recent crazes these days is StumbleUpon, a plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you “find great websites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.” It’s become so big that The Wall Street Journal and BBC World News have published articles on it. And us webmasters are starting to learn on how to exploit it.

Trading stumbles is a simple, easy process. You get a bunch of people to visit your site, click “I Like It!” on the StumbleUpon toolbar, and write a quick, favorable review for you, and you do the same for them. This increases the likelihood that others of the thousands who use StumbleUpon will randomly stumble across your website, thus increasing your traffic - since the more “Likes” your site has the more likely StumbleUpon is to show it to other users.

Seems pretty innocent, right? There are even a few “official” sites out there to facilitate the trade of stumbles. With this in mind, I went around the internet on a quest to find out if trading stumbles could get you in trouble. Here is what I found…

It is believed that StumbleUpon checks the IP where the “I Like!”s come from, and if most of them are from the same IP address, StumbleUpon will give them considerable less weight in the algorithm. This is not confirmed, however.

I have not found one occurrence though of StumbleUpon deleting the websites from their databases that have received large amounts of stumbles from a single IP. This is probably because the website owner does not have any control over who reviews their site. But I also didn’t hear of anyone getting banned from their StumbleUpon account for trading stumbles - they seem a lot more lax on this sort of thing than Digg does.

To get final confirmation, I emailed the StumbleUpon team. Contrary to what I had been hearing from people who’ve traded stumbles, I found out that they have a very strict anti-incentive policy:

StumbleUpon does not allow personal accounts to be used for the purposes of incentivization or promoting sites. This would be considered a breach of our Terms.

Yikes! But what exactly does this mean?

The practice of sending PM’s encouraging or inviting other stumblers to rate/review sites in exchange for reciprocal reviews/ratings, monetary, or any other form of reward is strictly forbidden.

And apparently they do ban users:

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

So although I have not been able to find anyone who has been banned from StumbleUpon or had their site deleted, they do have a very strict policy against trading stumbles. It’s probably a hard process to delineate between “real” stumbles and traded stumbles, but if they catch you, you’re outta there!

Bummer, you may be thinking. Consider this, though: you may have increased your traffic by a few untargetted visits a month at most. I asked people who had done this in the past what the results were like, and this was the general consensus: not worth the work. My advice is to use your energy and time pursuing some other path of promotion that is proven to work - like reading more of this blog! ;)

Share and Enjoy: