How Spammers Are Damaging Stumble Upon

Stumble Upon is one of my favourite online services and I use FriendFeed to live stream the sites that I like to my main blog. In that way, visitors have a chance to see what sites I like, what I’ve been visiting and can interact with me on Stumble Upon.

What I love about SU is just how easy it is to track down fantastic sites that tyou’ve never seen before. The “human edited” element of the content is important to me. In contrast to most of the major search engines, the sites that do best in SU are simply those that provide the absolute best user experience rather than the ones that know the most powerful SEO techniques.

But there are two weaknesses to Stumble Upon which I feel are causing some damage to the service. The first of these is reasonably minor - people submitting their sales sites to Stumble Upon. SU isn’t the plave to submit hardsell sales letters and shopping carts. People visit SU for entertainment, not to be sold to, but it is simple enough to bury these sites as they arise.

The harder option is that once a site has been submitted to Stumble Upon, you cannot change the category it is in. This means that if you had a website on dog training, and deliberately submitted all your competitors sites to the music category, not only would music people have little interest in their site, but they couldn’t then change the category.

Now I will say to be fair that Stumble Upon does give you the option to request a change of category, but I personally requested a change of Google’s keyword tool out of the “Africa” section several months ago and to date SU has made no changes. And as I say, that is to Google.

So the evidence suggests that once you are in a category, that’s where you’ll stay. Come on Stumble Upon - sort out this floor to make the service even better.