Stumble Upon is a well known web service and content discovery service used most commonly via a toolbar installed in your web browser. Users give sites positive or negative ratings to form collaborative opinions on pages including tagging information. Stumble Upon was very popular to pass the time, we have found ourselves stumbling for hours before without even realizing the time going by.

Stumble Upon got so big that eBay purchased the project for $75 million in May of 2007. However are quick SEO options killing practical enjoyable services like Stumble Upon. A popular SEO action is to make a web of links from social bookmarking sites. These sites are made for people to find useful content, and tag that content accordingly for easy search indexing. However these sites are being spammed day in and day out with a ton of useless sites that are merely trying to get higher on search engine rankings.

The Stats

Now it is rumored eBay is trying to sell Stumble Upon. Recent stats show a drop from 4.4 million visitors to 1.3 million visitors, and 31 million page views to 25 million within 12 months of purchasing the company. Though these numbers are high, they are decreasing, which is never a good prospect.

Camid Studio’s Thoughts

Though we have practiced this technique as well, it is a high probability, the spam from SEO tricks are causing the drop in use of these services. The troublesome part is, we do not believe the spamming will ever stop so that these services can flourish again. The only way to really eliminate it would be to monitor every site added, and either reject or accept the link after reviewing the link. This would take a lot of man power, time and effort, and would only lead into tricks of being accepted, and then redirecting all traffic to another site that most likely would have been rejected in the first place.

We still plan on stumbling whenever we find our selves with some free time and bored out of our minds as long as stumble upon is still around. Feel free to do the same by checking out Stumble Upon.

Tags: Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Stumble Upon