by Jessica Bosari

Created on: April 21, 2009   Last Updated: April 23, 2009

StumbleUpon is a popular website for social bookmarking that many mistakenly use to promote their own work. Self-promotion is sometimes frowned upon by social networking sites. The issue is looked at differently at each site. Some see no problem with it and others see it as shameless spam.

StumbleUpon Penalizes Same-Site Promotion

StumbleUpon's popularity makes it a tempting place to promote your Helium articles, but you should know they are one of the sites that will penalize you for self-promotion. Sadly, StumbleUpon does not tell you this upfront and it is up to you to learn the best way to use the site.

If you use StumbleUpon to promote your own work, the links will be accepted at first. However, after about five postings in close succession from the same URL, StumbleUpon will stop accepting your submissions. You will not see any notification telling you why the submission failed. You just get a blank screen.

Implications for Helium Writers

This has strong implications for Helium writers, who may be encouraged to stumble their work. The title of this topic alone is misleading, suggesting Helium writers should use StumbleUpon to promote. However, Helium users will be penalized by StumbleUpon if they over self-promote. Even if an avid reader reads and promotes five different articles from five different authors at StumbleUpon, all Helium writers suffer.

StumbleUpon's Algorithm

The reason your links stop being submitted is that StumbleUpon uses a formula or algorithm to dictate how items are promoted. The number of links from a certain domain by the same user simply stop being accepted. The already posted links can also be buried deeper in the site so no one can ever find them.

This also means that if you are a big fan of a particular website, whether affiliated with you or not, you will not be able to post frequent links for that site. The formula allows that over time, you can submit more from the same URL. So do the sites you like a favor and only Stumble them occasionally.

What to do About It

Instead of Stumbling your own work, you can still benefit from StumbleUpon. Be sure to encourage your readers to stumble you when you post to social networks that do allow self-promotion. Always avoid promoting your own site because some users have reported that even when they stopped stumbling their own stuff and visitors stumbled them instead, their site still showed lower rankings in StumbleUpon. It appears that StumbleUpon penalties for self-promotion go one forever and ever, amen.

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