cleaning out the closet on StumbleUpon

I have recently heard news about StumbleUpon banning several accounts because the users submitted comercial content. Here is the message these unfortunate stumblers usually received:

Regrettably, your account privileges have been suspended due to a breach of our TOS. I respectfully draw your attention to our Terms, particularly with respect to the clauses which forbid the use of personal accounts for the promotion of a business, product or service, and also with regard to the sending of ’spam’ messages to other members.

Our terms can be found here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms.html

Under the circumstances, the restriction is unlikely to be lifted.

Was it a surprise? For many yes, but if you take a look at their TOS, you’ll see these actions are strictly frowned upon. StumbleUpon is not for selling things, not for promoting an affiliate program, not for blatant product reviews, with a buy link.
Consequently, some of the people that befriended these “commercial accounts” can have some kind of flag raised.

So here are a few steps for cleaning your closet on StumbleUpon one of my friends, kukon,  let me in on:

• Take a look at the people you are mutual friends with. Click on the username without any avatar. Usually, when an account is under review, the display image or avatar is not displayed in the SU network. Remove that user from your friend list and the page will change to an empty one, if it’s the case, saying the account is reviewed.
• See what your friends are submitting or stumbling upon. Constantly submitting or thumbing up articles from certain domains can damage your account.
• Be an active user for the community. Try to submit things that are interesting to others, that have the potential to turn popular. Contribute and make yourself known to other stumblers!

Recently, StumbleUpon has also been banning websites that offered stumble exchanges. Here is an excerpt confirming it:
Are incentive programs allowed? Someone asked me to rate their web-site?

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.

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.

The practice of actively soliciting a rating or review for a site is also forbidden. Should you receive a PM, or encounter forum postings that breach this rule, you are encouraged to report this via feedback.
Accounts participating in such practices will be deleted and banned, and the related sites deleted and banned from the system.

What happens if your site gets ‘blacklisted’ by Google?

What is the impact on a website of being ‘blacklisted’ by Google? Recently the insurance comparison website GoCompare.com faced precisely this dilemma after the search engine picked up on irregular inbound links to its site, causing it to plummet down the rankings.

We are currently seeing a seasonal peak in searches for ‘car insurance’, and the term has increased its share of searches by 31% since the week ending 29th December. Before it fell out with Google, this was good news for GoCompare as the comparison site had established itself as the top website within Google’s natural / organic listings for the term. However, since being ‘blacklisted’ it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings – i.e. well outside of the top 10.

Looking at the data, during the week ending 26th January 2008 GoCompare was the number one site receiving traffic from the term ‘car insurance’, capturing 17.49% of the all search traffic from the term. In fact, the term was so important to GoCompare that it was the number one term sending traffic to the site, accounting for more traffic even than the branded term ‘go compare’. During the week ending 26 January 2008, one in six visits to the site came from the term.

The chart below shows traffic to GoCompare from the term ‘car insurance’ on the left axis, compared to overall searches for the term on the right axis. The area highlighted in red illustrates the impact on GoCompare after the blacklisting had taken effect (during week ending 2nd February).

GoCompare received only 2.31% of all search term traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ during the week ending 9th February, which is an 87% decrease from week ending 26th Jan when it held the #1 natural position on Google. However, as we see from this chart, searches for ‘car insurance’ remained constant during this period.

So what has the impact been on GoCompare’s competitors in the insurance price comparison sector? Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com have shown the largest increase in traffic from searches for ‘car insurance’ over the last two weeks. Traffic from the term to Confused.com has increased by 77% since the 26th January, while traffic to Comparethemarket.com has tripled over the same period.

Search engines are the most important source of traffic to finance price comparison websites, accounting for over a third of their upstream traffic. Ensuring that a website is well-optimised for search engines is vital in such a competitive industry, but this example illustrates the fine balance that needs to be achieved between effective SEO and breaking the ‘rules’.