Recently I came across an article, which suggested to use www.suexchange.com in order to increase the traffic on your site, the suggestion was quite mouthwatering, I immediately accessed this site, and registered myself, and I felt it actually doesn’t build up any regular traffic.
The Whole process on this site goes as follows
#1 As soon as you Signup and Login in your account for the first time, you will have 5 points ready for you. On the right side of your page you will have several options, there you can see a block “Your Websites”. Here you can submit the site you want to get Stumbled.
#2 As soon as you have submitted a link, now another user on Suexchange.com will come across this link, and suppose he stumbles the site, which you have submitted through link and sends you a message, which will claim that he has stumbled your site, so a point will be removed from your account, and you need to give a +point to that user who stumbled your site, in this way you get a hit on the link you submitted and the user who stumbled your site gets one more point.
#3 Now there is another block on the right-side of the page named as “Stumble”, which will take you to random list of the Websites submitted by different users, in order to get their sites stumbled. Now you too can make points, you simply stumble any site you feel like and send a message to the user who submitted it in order to claim a stumble, this claim of yours will remove a point from the account of the particular user whose link has been stumbled by you, he will have to give you a +point to get his point back.
My Analysis
Now, what I realized is, whenever I get a claim from some other user, generally the claim also has a message, like, “you stumble me back, I will stumble 2 of your sites” or “Stumbled!! Can I get it back??” or “I will stumble yours if you stumble mine” and so on. Such kind of messages invokes the greed of getting some more stumbles, and you do the favor, and stumble few more sites for others.
You Scratch My back I scratch Yours
So, this way you certainly get more stumbles and more hits to your site, but this traffic is on your site just to claim a stumble, generally, people don’t read the article there, so, you can observe some increase in traffic….but what’s the use of this increased traffic?? Moreover, this whole process becomes a simple “Give and Take” game, which has nothing to do with the Usefulness, Quality of Websites. People blindly stumble the listed sites, just to make points and get few more stumbles.
Things They can Improve on
Making Better Rules
I think some more rules should be imposed in this process, in order to save stumbleupon.com from being gamed, and to really help the users to make some more traffic.
Categorize
One thing that can be done is, categorizing the submitted links, like I want to read the stuff on photography, so when I want to stumble somebody else’s site I should not come across a recipe blog, (like we have this facility on stumbleupon), because in such case when user will come across only the links relevant to his field of interest, then the chances of honest stumble increases for sure.
One Main Flaw
One more flaw on Suexchange is if you get a stumble claim, then you check and find that this is a fake claim, the user actually never stumbled your site, you just cant do anything, 1 point which was removed from your account against this claim, can only be credited to your account by giving this user a +point, even if he has sent a fake claim.
There is no mechanism to report this fake claim and get your point back, I think a method should be introduced to give some –point to the fake claim.
This is just an outcome of my experience, please let me know what do you think about it, or if you feel that whatever I said here is not true, may be I am not able to use this service properly that’s why I had this experience, please have your say.
Related : Things I like about Stumbleupon and things I don’t
