Wednesday, April 18, 2007

StumbleUpon Deletes Audience Rank Feature

StumbleUpon has ticked some of their users off recently by removing their audience rank feature.

SEO expert Joe Whyte wrote this on his
blog about the sites actions. "It looks like Stumble Upon has taken a page out of the book of digg and started removing factors that allow you to gauge your rank and profile power within stumble upon."

In an email interview with WebProNews, Mr.Whyte gave his thoughts on how this affects SEO. "Social media is about leveraging your community positioning in order to bring viral attention, traffic, exposure and inevitably links to your site."

"There is a fine line to walk when SEOs leverage community positioning. Our tactics can be used by spammers and something that I try my best to do is contribute quality information to social media sites like StumbleUpon."

When it comes to which sites users should promote, Mr. Whyte said," In order to leverage social media you have to be vary meticulous in choosing who you should promote. You cannot promote just anything, you must promote quality content to these sites or your profile will begin to fade."

He went on to say that that audience rank on
StumbleUpon affected him in two ways. Whenever his audience rank increased, it was a good indication that the power behind his profile was growing. When he would contribute to the site his audience grew which motivated him to keep using the site.

On why StumbleUpon removed the audience rank feature Mr. Whyte said," This affects SEO/SMOs because that tool is a way we can gauge our effectiveness but I think as a user and contributor it also takes away from the entire StumbleUpon experience. Unfortunately a few bad apples most likely spoiled this for the rest of us."

eBay is rumored to be making a deal to purchase StumbleUpon for around $40-$45 million. AOL and Google have also been mentioned as possible buyers but eBay seems to be the frontrunner.

Source: www.webpronews.com



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