I’ve always been a big fan of StumbleUpon.

It’s easy to use. I have loads of friends and I like sharing lots of different sites.

And the knock on effect is that it brings traffic to my site.

A few months ago StumbleUpon suddenly banned my site, this site. Friends were telling me they could no longer ‘thumb up’ blog posts on WeBuildYourBlog.com.

I was gob smacked!

I contacted them and asked why.

They said, “I’ve been spamming and someone complained”.

I thought, “I don’t spam, I’ve never spammed.”

Let me tell you a story….

A few months ago, a professional writer friend and I started another blog, www.TheDigitalArchives.com (an article writing service).

My partner is the writer and I’m the technical one.

We launched the site and I shared it with my stumble friends saying, “What do you think?” or words similar to that.

From one Stumble ‘friend’ I received a lot of abuse.

“Why didn’t I start a business with him?”

“He could write for me”

I’ve omitted the abusive swear words.

I ‘un-friended him’. He was no longer a StumbleUpon friend and I moved on.

Two days later my site is banned.

I have no proof he complained. I have no proof my site is banned by StumbleUpon as a direct result but it’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?

This week, a few months later. I thought I’d ask StumbleUpon to see if they would lift my ban and asked again why my site was banned in the first place.

This is what I asked:

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My site, http://www.webuildyourblog.com has been ‘banned’ by StumbleUpon for several months now and I still don’t understand why.

Could someone please explain and take my site off the ‘banned’ list?

Thanks.

Andrew

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This is what they said in reply:

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Hello Andrew,

Thank you for contacting us.

When a site is excluded from our service, it will be for either technical reasons, or because of a breach of our Terms of Service. We reserve the right to do this, and any such exclusion is permanent.

Having reviewing your account history, Andrew, it appears that you’ve repeatedly submitted content from one or more sites in particular, which is technically a breach of our Terms, and I would ask you to ensure that you have read these: http://www.stumbleupon.com/terms/

If you’re interested in using StumbleUpon to advertise a Web site, please look into our Advertising program:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads

I hope that this is helpful to you.

Regards,

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It wasn’t helpful at all.

”It appears that you’ve repeatedly submitted content from one or more sites in particular”

Since joining StumbleUpon, I’ve ‘thumbed up’ 9,184 different blog posts.

I have 169 blog posts on this site and I would estimate that I have stumbled approx 10 before getting banned. So if 10 out of 9,184 is “repeatedly submitting content”, then all users of StumbleUpon better watch out.

What about those ‘friends’ that send me 3, 4, 5 or 6 blog posts from the same site begging me to ‘thumb up’, Digg, tweet and Reddit?

Are they being monitored and banned?

I doubt it!

I did write back but I am still awating a response.

I feel I am being fobbed off by StumbleUpon and think I will just have to accept that my site is banned for ever.

Ho hum!

What’s your view of StumbleUpon? Share your experiences in the comments below.

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