Stumble swapping: The good and the bad

It is no secret that Stumble Upon can potentially drive large volumes of traffic to your website or blog over a short period of time. It is also no secret that most, not all but most, people won’t stumble a site if left to their own devices. Getting you blog post or website stumbled can be a daunting task. You can do what many people do and simply wait, hope, and pray someone will stumble it. You can request stumbles from the readers and viewers. Both of those ways are largely ineffective. There is one effective way to guarantee stumbles. That is stumble swapping/exchanges

How it works

Briefly the way most of them work:

1. Find a stumble swap website
2. Register
3. Stumble some URLs from a list
4. Submit some URLs you’d like stumbled
5. Wash, rinse and repeat steps 3 and 4

It may or may not be more complicated than that depending on the website doing the exchanges. There are also several forums out there which allow for swapping stumbles (and sometimes Diggs).

Determine which method to use

Like I mentioned before there are both websites and forums to choose from for stumble swapping purposes. Each one works, but both work in a different way.

Forums – advantages and disadvantages:

• Advantage: You can suggest the tags, category, and description for the stumble
• Advantage: There’s a much more personal interaction as forums naturally allow for discussion
• Disadvantage: You won’t get the volume of stumbles you would from a stumble exchange website due to the simplicity of the site
• Disadvantage: Usually the stumbles are slow in coming because there’s a lot more manual “labor” involved
• Disadvantage: Same people and faces stumbling your URLs over and over again and again
• Disadvantage: Are often private logins so the exposure is minimized

Websites – advantages and disadvantages:

• Advantage: The stumble volume is much greater much faster
• Advantage: Very quick process as you don’t often need to submit tags, category, or descriptions
• Advantage: Lot of different people stumbling your URLs so it looks much more natural
• Disadvantage: You can’t suggest tags, category, or descriptions

Common to both – advantages and disadvantages:

• Advantage: High volume of traffic to your website
• Disadvantage: May or may not violate some companies advertising rules
• Disadvantage: If you wish to ensure certain tags, category, description, you need to stumble it yourself first
• Advantage: An initial spike in traffic that wanes off, but always has the potential of sending you more
• Disadvantage: Both methods can be time consuming

Google Adsense and stumble swaps

Google is very sensitive to anything but strictly organic traffic. If you take the time to read the Adsense policy there are two things they say which may or may not be of concern for people who use stumble swap sites:

I
A site or third party cannot display our ads, search box, search results, or referral buttons as a result of the actions of any software application such as a toolbar.

II
Webpages containing AdSense code may not be loaded by any software that can trigger pop-ups, redirect users to unwanted websites, modify browser settings, or otherwise interfere with site navigation. It is your responsibility to ensure that no ad network or affiliate uses such methods to direct traffic to pages that contain your AdSense code.
Source

I’ve tried a number of times emailing Google to get some clarification as to whether or not they view stumble exchanges as a violation of either of those rules or any other rules. Each time I get a canned response about how they take fraudulent activity very seriously and will investigate all such incidents. The bottom line is that if you choose to use stumble swapping to drive some traffic to your site you may run afoul of Google’s policies. That’s a decision you need to make as to whether or not it’s worth the risk. Keep in mind Google generally doesn’t give warnings they simply enforce the policy and move on.

Stumble Upon’s “official” stance

After reviewing Stumbleupon’s terms of use I am unable to locate anything that deals with this specifically. I also went through the archives of their help forums but found nothing there either. I am sending them an email asking what their policy is and will update this post when I find out for sure.

Conclusion

Using Stumble swaps/exchanges will definitely drive large volumes of traffic to your site. The real question is how useful is that traffic to you. If no one bothers to view the site then not very useful. If however you hook even 5 or 10 percent of the traffic stumble upon can send you then you’ll make great strides increasing your audience. A key ingredient to getting viewers who will actually read your site is to ensure it is categorized and tagged properly. People actually use the tags to find things they are interested in. If you tag for “animals” and your stumbled site is about “sewing” you can bet it won’t be very effective.

You also have to decide for yourself if it A) violates Google’s (or other ad publisher) Adsense policies and B) are you willing to risk being banned from the program(s). If you largely monetize using things like Adsense you might seriously consider if the risk is worth it. On the other hand if you monetize via direct sales as long as your advertisers don’t have a problem with it I can’t see why you wouldn’t use a stumble swap service. And even if they did there are always 500 more to replace them that don’t have a problem.

Do you use a stumble swap/exchange service? How has it helped or hurt your blog/website?