Stumbleupon Gamed by Paid-to-Stumble Service

Mashable announces some unpleasant news. Unethical and unscrupulous website owners can pay to have their sites bookmarked on the popular StumbleUpon service. The controversial “service” behind this has already been paying Diggers to unnaturally promote links at Digg. Digg is already gamed from the inside, and it’s audience seems to be made up mostly of puerile adolescents, so I never cared much about it. But it would be very sad if you had to start wondering whether an article or site was stumbled because the user was paid. I have the feeling that it wouldn’t be too hard to spot these StumbleUpon users and ban their IP addresses: their stumble lists would be full of crap, and their profile information would be minimal. They would never join any StumbleUpon communities. There would be no avatar.

I hope StumbleUpon plans to fight this. There’s nothing wrong with doing it, legally, but because StumbleUpon is only worth the value of its links to its users, it would be in StumbleUpon’s best interest (that being the best interests of its users) to fight any attempts to game their system with cash.

If you want to get increased stumbles, here’s the right way to do it: Please Stumble this Post! Stumblers need to know about this! Thank you!

If you want to really get traffic to your blog from StumbleUpon, then I invite you to check out Traffic Rush. Traffic Rush is an educational program that teaches you how to become a valuable member of StumbleUpon and how to participate in StumbluUpon to provide maximum benefit to others, thereby driving traffic to your own blog.

There are two parts to the course, a free part and a paid part. I would suggest you go through the free part to see if you like it and if it helps you (it’s oriented to beginners). If you find it helpful, then I think you’ll find the paid part will be worth it. It’s been my experience that traffic from StumbleUpon can be huge and it’s relevant traffic. Traffic from StumbleUpon is likely to stick around and subscribe to your blog. There’s no need to try and game StumbleUpon. You can get tons of traffic fair and square with Traffic Rush.

Technorati Tags: stumbleupon, paid to stumble, blog spam, comment spam