StumbleUpon wants to be a search engine. Kind of. It also wants to be more like Twitter and Facebook. Kind of. Better search and better social elements are the two cornerstones of StumbleUpon’s new web site, which was announced this week and will roll out to all during the next month.

There’s no doubt the site looks better. Beyond the cleaner layout, StumbleUpon says its new features include:

• search for sites within your own favorites
• search your friend’s favorites
• improved friend search capabilities
• improved site navigation
• improved navigation within user profiles

There are other changes, too. The old “What’s New” page has been replaced by a “Recent Activity” page; StumbleUpon borrows from Twitter lingo by calling this a page of “nearly real-time updates.” Friend requests have been replaced by “subscription” — when you subscribe to a user, that person’s stumbles will appear in your Recent Activity page. The old “Similarity Meter” is gone, and StumbleUpon Groups has been diminished — it’s now only available through a footer link.

The main thing that hasn’t changed is that new pages must still be added (stumbled) via the StumbleUpon toolbar. This seems odd to me, given that StumbleUpon’s changes seem to encourage more use of its web site. If StumbleUpon wants to position itself as a sort-of search engine, it would be the only search engine where a “submit URL” forum would actually matter; sites and pages don’t get into StumbleUpon without someone submitting them.

I’ve been a StumbleUpon user for several years, and I rarely visit the web site; my activity is almost strictly toolbar-based. StumbleUpon says a new version of the toolbar is on the way, and will also integrate many of these new features.

The DiggBar has been out for about a week now. Since then, there continues to be concerns over twin issues of whether it robs sites of link love and frames their contents in a way that’s unfair to publishers. I had a good conversation with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose today about these issues and how Digg is actively looking at ways to solve worries over the tool.

For those unfamiliar with the DiggBar, it allows people to create a short URL that’s useful in services like Twitter. Anyone clicking on a shortened URL made through Digg gets to a page with a DiggBar at the top. For example, here’s how it looks for a post I recently did on my personal blog about newspapers and concerns over Google:

The red arrow points at one feature, how the DiggBar allows anyone to vote on the page they’re viewing. There are other handy features, such as the ability to see any comments people have made at Digg about the page:

There’s no doubt that if you use Digg a lot, you’ll probably love the DiggBar. But the bar does two things that aren’t making some people (including me) very happy. It doesn’t pass along link credit, and it frames web content.

Link Credit Issues

Last week, my URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? article went into depth about how various URL shorteners work. A key issue is whether these shorteners tells search engines to credit the destination URLs they point at. Those issues what’s called a “301 redirect” do this correctly (my What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters article covers more about link credit issues and why it is important to search rankings).

The DiggBar does not do a 301 redirect (nor can it, as this would prevent the DiggBar from showing at all). If you shorten a page using DiggBar service, then Twitter the short URL you receive, any links that Google or other search engines find via that short URL will send credit to Digg, not to the destination page you shortened.

A sidenote here. Twitter automatically puts a “nofollow attribute” on any links that people tweet. That’s a method to tell search engines that the links shouldn’t be counted as “votes” as part of their ranking processes. However, tweets often appear off the Twitter.com domain. In some of these places, the nofollow attribute (or tag) doesn’t get used. So tweeted links can get counted by search engines, and it remains important that URL shorteners pass along credit to the destination pages.

Digg had a blog post out yesterday explaining that they had done some things they believed would stem concerns about link credit not flowing properly. SEO expert Greg Boser dissected that post, finding it didn’t hold up. I also looked at it today and found problems:

1) Using the noindex tag prevents the pages that Digg makes with shortened URLs from being spidered by Google and other search engines, but that does not solve the issue of them still accumulating all the link credit rather than this going to the destination URL. Also, so far despite using noindex, some of these pages are getting listed in Google. Here’s another example of this. (Looking at the source code, that page lacked a noindex tag an a canonical tag. It seems like originally, the DiggBar didn’t add these tags. Now that they are present, it will take search engines a few days to weeks to catch-up).

2) Using the canonical tag as a form of redirection doesn’t work, because that tag is still treated as a “hint” by search engines rather than an must obey instruction. It also doesn’t work across different domains (IE, Digg.com can’t point at content off Digg.com’s own domain and use the tag to tell the search engines anything).3) The “source URL” solution Digg discusses doesn’t solve anything. What this means is that if you’re on the Digg home page, stories are listed there from across the web. For example, here’s a popular one right now from the Daily Telegraph:

http://digg.com/d1oOii

Digg uses a short URL to point you at that story, which in turn brings the DiggBar up on the top of the page. However, if you can’t run JavaScript (as search engines operate), then you get the long “source URL” like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/evolution/5131017/Egg-collected-by-Charles-Darwin-found-at-Cambridge-University-after-200-years.html

Digg’s thought was that by showing the long “source” URL to search engines, then the long URL ultimately will get all the link credit. However, there are plenty of places where the short URL will be found across the web by search engines because it is listed with regular HTML, rather than through JavaScript.

Framing Issues

Back in the late 1990s, framing was a big issue. For those unfamiliar, frames allow a web site to pull in content from other web sites into their own pages. It was much loathed for a variety of reasons. It often led to bad user experience. It caused serious issues for search engines, making it difficult for them to spider content properly. Some felt it was a copyright violation — that the site doing the framing was effectively copying their material without permission.

Framing largely disappeared for all of these issues. But now it’s coming back, and Digg’s use with the DiggBar may have been the tipping point.

Last October, StumbleUpon added framing of sites, so that anyone starting a browsing experience from StumbleUpon’s home page gets a framebar like this, as the red arrow points at:

Back in December, Facebook added its own framing of content through a framebar that appears when you click on posted links from within the service. Again, the red arrow points to an example that you can see for yourself here:

Ask.com started framing search results in February. The red arrow below points to the framebar, which appears when you click from Ask search results to a web page that’s listed, like this:

Ask used to do this when it first started out back in the 90s, then dropped framing apparently because so many sites moved away from that model. Now with harder economic times, it apparently finds value in trying to take over the top part of your browser window.

Of course, Google also frames web sites with its Google Image Search service. I believe it has operated this way years and years ago from when image search first started:

There was actually a lawsuit over this, which Google won. Despite that, this might be a good time for Google to reconsider the framing it does.

Also, if Google were ever to frame web sites when you click to them from search results in the way Ask does, the web would almost certain erupt in anger. I don’t think this will happen, of course — but if it’s not something we’d allow Google to do, it’s not something we should be allowing any sites to do.

Framebars Versus Toolbars

Clearly Digg didn’t start the new wave of framing, but it certainly has taken much more heat than Facebook or StumbleUpon over it. I think it’s the combination of URL shortening with framing that’s tipped people over the edge. That mixed framing with the popularity Twitter, where most people these days seem to be using URL shorteners. I think it creates worry that there will be no stopping framing or framebars now.

I feel for services like Digg and Facebook and StumbleUpon. The framebars they’ve created are useful and certainly easier than having users install toolbars for their browsers. But they remain frames, and they bring with them all the negatives about frames that we had in the past.

I’d hope that perhaps there’s an industry move to develop some standards around framebars. For example, if they’re going to be used, perhaps they are less intrusive to a publisher if shown at the bottom of a browser window, rather than at the top. Perhaps there’s also a way to ensure that the URL showing in the browser window remains that of the “source” site with the framebar also displayed (it’s been a long time since I played with frames, so I’m not sure this can be done).

Other ideas might include developing a standard script that publishers can use if they want to break frame code but also inform visitors from a particular site (such as Digg or Facebook) that they can get similar functionality using software toolbars. Perhaps pop-up toolbars in a separate window could work, though there are issues with pop-up blockers.

I don’t know the right answer. Personally, I think the easiest thing would be for everyone to just say no to frames. If you want your dedicated users to have toolbar-like functionality, then have them install an actual toolbar, not a framebar.

Kevin Rose On DiggBar

How’s Digg viewing the uproar? “It’s been a crazy learning experience for us,” Rose said. “We want to follow best practices.”

Rose explained that initially, Digg wanted simply to do a toolbar to help their most active users more easily Digg content or comment on it.

“We wondered what can we create that allows people to go visit that site with a single click and still get a Digg experience. That was kind of the idea behind creating the bar in the first place,” he said.

More as an afterthought, when seeing how popular it was to shorten URLs on Twitter, Digg added on a shortening aspect to the DiggBar.

“The goal in creating this wasn’t, ‘Let’s be the universal URL shortener.’ It was ‘Let’s make a tool that can enhance the experience for Digg users’.”

Rose said someone at Digg did speak with a software engineer at Google, as mentioned in their blog post, about the best way to pass along credit to Google — but he didn’t know who that was. Fair to say, they’ll get the straight scoop shortly, as Rose is now set to speak to Matt Cutts, who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts and who also closely watches over webmaster issues.

As for the DiggBar’s future itself, Rose said the company is taking in all the feedback to determine what’s the next best step.

“I want to make it known by all means that we’re sitting down and thinking about this stuff and trying to come up with solutions that work for anyone,” he said.

What’s A Webmaster To Do?

While Digg reexamines the DiggBar, there are webmasters who will remain concerned. My original article on URL shorteners has code you can use to block framebars. Wikipedia has a page about this, too, and you can see John Gruber’s code here. By the way, we actually had that code on our site before the DiggBar came out, just as a general best practice of breaking frames.

Of course, if you like the idea that people can more easily Digg (or Stumble or Facebook) your content, then you might not have an issue with using the frames.

I’d still recommend that if you’re wanting to shorten URLs for your own sites, use a service that’s primarily built for that and which does 301 redirect.

The past few weeks have been busy for the people over at StumbleUpon and its users alike. Just a few weeks ago, StumbleUpon lifted the 200 friend max from its user base and added a subscribe feature. On Wednesday my favorite social community announced that there were yet more changes to their discovery/recommendation engine.

This new user experience is being called “beyond the toolbar”. Not only do you not need to download a toolbar, but you actually don’t even need to be registered with StumbleUpon to stumble anymore. This is really a “new user” experience. Let’s check it out.

Home Page

Note: if you are logged in, the home page looks different unless you are part of the beta testing group.

I was trying to figure out a rhyme or reason as to how the recommended sites end up there. After clicking around and seeing the discovery origin of some of those sites, the only common factor I found was that they were all old. Most had been discovered in 2006.

Topic Navigation

The new home page now displays a category navigation bar at the top that displays hot sites within that particular topic. The sites listed on this page do move around a bit, but how to get your page on there is still not clear to me. I happen to know one of the bloggers with a site on there and he did say that he hasn’t seen any increase in traffic. Granted, I don’t think most people know about this yet.

Hover Stats

This is my favorite addition so far. You can simply hover over the avatars and see whether or not the user is an active stumbler (someone who’s stumbled a lot of pages). This will save time when trying to find users to friend and subscribe to.

The Non Toolbar

When you click on one of the sites from the home page or category pages, you’ll get a temporary toolbar. From there you can stumble through the category you were originally in or go back to StumbleUpon. And yes, you can only thumb up. If you click on the stars to review the site it will take you to the site’s review page which is where the fun stops. In order to review, you have to be registered.

Partner Sites

The other aspect of “beyond the toolbar” is partner sites. StumbleUpon has partnered with sites that display a voting button. Right now membership into the partner program is by invitation only and it’s likely that acceptance will have to do with how many URLs in your site have been submitted by SU members over the years. The more the better I’d imagine so the pages would already have lots of thumbs up. Today Huffington Post and How Stuff Works are the two partner sites listed.

At a glance this looks like one button. What is somewhat unclear is that you can vote from the top of the button, but if you click on the lower half you will begin stumbling through the same site. The SU logo on the left doesn’t do anything, so in my opinion, they need to work on this a little.

After you vote that you like it you get this and can begin stumbling through the site you are on.

New Profile Page

If you are in the beta testing group at StumbleUpon you will see the new profile page. It lists the user stats on the bottom right, but in general looks similar enough to the old one that I don’t mind the change. One thing I noticed that was missing right away was the online indicator. If you want more info on the beta testing group,  send a message to bookun via his profile.

There has been a lot of talk and speculation recently about eBay wanting to get rid of StumbleUpon, but until anything happens I am not going to stop using it. With over 6 million users contributing to over 350 million stumbles per month, it’ll be interesting to watch that number climb over the next few months. I really like the changes and I think overall it is a positive move on their part. As with any change there are usually varied opinions out there. I will leave you with some quotes on the new StumbleUpon from some notable internet marketers across the web.

• Brent Csutoras “I am actually very impressed with the change at StumbleUpon. They have finally decided to let users participate in the site without having to install the toolbar. I really like the organization of the categories (or tags) and the navigational bar makes it much easier to explore and use the site. They seem to have taken all the good changes other social media sites have made and put them to good use on what has to be one of the best relaunches of an existing service to date.”
• Chris Winfield “I think it will really help StumbleUpon gain more acceptance by the general public. A lot of people are either (1) not technical enough to install the toolbar & get the idea behind or (2) wary of toolbars with all of their spyware concerns. This should really help them gain more mainstream adoption.”
• Michael Gray “I like the on page stumble button that shows you the thumbs up count, but the stumble through lower portion of the button is confusing. The mini frame that sits on top of websites is clean and easy to use, but there needs to be a way to activate, if you don’t go through partner sites first. I also feel if they went with a Stumble through and thumbs up button similar to the way delicious buttons work they would make things easier for power users.”
• Brian Wallace “The site on first glance seems to be less about the power users now. This may feel like a shame for those that have put extensive effort into their SU profile, yet breathes new life into a social network that was starting lose ground to the likes of Propeller and Reddit.”

The title of this article doesn’t mean I’m changing my position on social media as link driver. Yes, it’s possible, but for the overwhelming majority of web sites, a widespread and costly social linking strategy is a waste of time and money. Go ahead, call me a heretic, but inside you know I’m right.

If the site is this one for adult diapers then really, what’s the social media end game? Sure, you could write a blog post or article like “Ten Uses For Adult Diapers you Never Thought Of” or “Five Sexiest Senior Citizens Naked,” and sure, it might just make it to the Digg homepage, where not a single clicker/reader will be a person in need of that specific product. In fact, for the diaper site, the social media strategy should probably be bare bones simple, such as providing for passive sociality by giving users the ability to share or bookmark the content. If you are determined to go more aggressively social with it, at least focus your efforts here and here rather than at all these here.

I read blogs from a bunch of Social Media experts, which I am not–yet, and the experts say the power of Digg isn’t always in making it to the home page, where you get thousands of mostly useless clicks. The power is in the “second wave” links that a Digg mention can cause. In simpler terms, of the thousands of people who see the post on the Digg homepage, a few might actually have their own blogs that are related to what they spotted at Digg, and when they see it at Digg, they might very well link to it themselves on their own blog or site. Well, duh. Isn’t that what we’ve all been doing since the Titanic sank, linking to stuff we find useful or interesting? Do we really need a central place to find the good stuff? Sometimes yes; mostly, so far, no.

Think of it as social fertilizer. If you spread enough of it, by gosh, someone somewhere will surely be interested, right? Wasn’t that the logic that turned my email inbox into a cesspool? At least with social media nobody gets hurt, since the nature of most social media sites is to shove the good upwards and the bad downwards. A couple years ago I compared SM spam to cigarette butts and the Village Wine parable.

For what it’s worth, I do engage in social media marketing and link building for many clients, but not for all of them. It’s about discretion. Adult diapers? No. Indiana Jones IV, absolutely, all day long. Oddly, there’s a potential tie-in between those two, since Harrison Ford is getting old enough to fit the adult diaper demographic, but that’s a topic for another day. Discretion. That’s what should be at the core of the social media plans we create and execute for clients. Discretion with what should be socialized, discretion with how you go about it, and discretion with what you do with the traffic and links you end up getting as a result. I agree with the fertilizer concept of link building, and I do use it today, just like we used it back in the day for pure traffic plays from venues like Yahoo Picks (gone now, but New and Notable Sites remains), or USA Today Hot Sites. The value of those was–like Digg today–in the amazing traffic spike they caused, with the trickle down secondary link increase being a natural, welcome, residual effect. Sort of like social media fertilizer, eh?

Let’s all of us remember what fertilizer is often made from.

Lastly, sticking with my example diaper site from the beginning of this column, rather than burning hours and client dollars on a social media strategy that is likely pointless, why not instead identify and seek links from the best venues you see here, where nearly every link your adult diaper site is able to earn will not only help your reputation and trust, but perhaps also your search rank.

You might even get a little interested traffic.

Eric Ward has been in the link building and content publicity game since 1994, providing services ranking from linking strategy and private customized link building training. The Link Week column appears on Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

StumbleUpon Expands Social Search Across the Web from TechCrunch reports StumbleUpon has expanded their toolbar from enhancing Google, Yahoo, or Windows Live search results to now also include AOL, Ask.com, Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

That means, if you use the StumbleUpon and search at YouTube, you will see “SearchReviews” with a star ratings feature, friend recommendations, friend reviews and so on. Future integrations include sites such as eBay and Skype.

More details at the StumbleUpon Blog.

The closing session for the first day of SMX Social Media is a keynote conversation with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon. We’re going to learn more about the landscape and future of social networking.

More coverage at Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal.

Garrett is up first. He cofounded StumbleUpon six years ago. For the first four years, they were based in Canada, then moved to the company to Silicon Valley. The company was recently bought by eBay. Danny mentioned a NY Times quote that said just because people stop watching TV in favor being on their computers, they aren’t going to stop channel surfing. Garrett talks a little about how StumbleUpon learns from what you like and recommends pages that are useful to you.

Joshua is up next and Danny notes that Del.icio.us was sold to Yahoo in 2005 (it was founded in 2003). Users have manually bookmarked things 100 million times. Joshua notes that it’s hard to find things after you initially discover them. He initially started Del.icio.us for personal use but found that people came to read what he had bookmarked, so he built out the sharing functions and things took off from there. He notes that he gets a popup when one of his friends saves something and wow, I had no idea Del.icio.us could work like that. Creepy, er, I mean cool!

Mostly this session will be questions. Danny wants to know about tagging usage and spamming. Joshua says that with tagging, “I find this interesting” and “I want you to find this interesting” look similar. But both he and Garrett say that they aren’t so much into spamming as a usage of their system. Garrett says that content stands on its merits. If it’s good content, it’ll get voted up; if it’s bad content, then the community will vote it down.

What about the challenges of being acquired by a large company? Joshua says they have 3 million users and that scale alone is challenging. He thinks he couldn’t have scaled to meet the needs of so many without the support and infrastructure of Yahoo. Garrett says they are staying very independent, the team and culture has remained the same, and eBay is mostly there for support.

How about actively vs. passively seeking? Joshua says search hasn’t changed much in a while and social meta data might be a way to evolve things. The strong partnership with Yahoo search means they can explore this a bit more. Garrett says StumbleUpon data is pretty clean — you have clear signals of pages being voted up or down. You don’t have the noise of the entire web like you do with major search engines. They don’t concern themselves with the entire web — just the top items people are voting for.

Any changes to StumbleUpon with the acquisition? Garrett says not so far. They have a different business model, their own team, and independence. What are they gaining with being acquired? Have their end goals changed? Both say they have additional funding, technology, scale with the new parent companies. Del.icio.us says they had just about maxed about before the acquisition and now has lots of resources, access to engineers who have experience with scale, and a customer support team. He says Yahoo hasn’t changed their direction or goals.

How was it that StumbleUpon took off? Garrett says the move to San Francisco made a big difference. They hadn’t hit critical mass before and that move helped them get involved with influencers. People became aware of them and they got more attention. Firefox also made a difference. Joshua notes that both teams worked for years before getting attention and it was really all that work that is being rewarded now.

How did they know they were on the right track? Garrett says he built it for himself. He wanted to browse sometimes — not only search. Once he had a remote control for the Internet, he thought others might like it also. Joshua also built Del.icio.us based on what he needed. As the engineer and the user, you learn about what works fairly quickly.

It is harder to implement things now, being owned by a large company? Joshua thinks dealing with a larger scale is what slows things down. When you have 10,000 users, you can experiment and break things. When you have 3 million users, you need a testing cycle.

Garrett agrees that when you have tons of users, you can’t just spring things on them. You need testing and documentation and usability research. The current redesign was first tested on a beta group of 800 people, who gave them feedback and helped them fine tune it.

If you believe in collective memory and collective voting, why nofollow links? Because they are trying to discourage spam. Danny wonders if it actually is a deterrent. They say yes. And if they could eliminate spam other ways would they get rid of the nofollow? They said maybe, but they think that having nofollow keeps away the motivation for spamming.

Joshua notes that with the flexible tagging, people can build add ons that he never intended and he uses those types of things to figure out what features to add next. For instance, lots of people use the tag “to read” to keep a list of what to read later. Garrett says they are looking to potentially make an API available so developers can create new things.

Are they looking to get more into social networking a la Facebook? Joshua says Del.icio.us wants to stay lightweight. They may add a bit of work groups and things, but don’t plan to be Facebook. Garrett thinks StumbleUpon is in between Del.icio.us and Facebook regarding social networking. They do plan to add social features, but keep them content-focused.

What about StumbleUpon’s pay features? Garrett says they’ve only launched some early features and that it’s been promising, so they’re definitely planning more. They are planning on offering more feedback about ads based on user behavior to help advertisers for instance. What about user feedback? Are they all irritated? No, since the ads are reviewed manually, the pages are relevant to the user and aren’t obtrusive. Less than 1 and 20 stumbles are paid and they plan to keep it at low volume.

Neil wants to know why Del.icio.us locks up if you have too many friends. Joshua says that’s being fixed in the next version. Neil says he’s excited to use Del.icio.us again. Joshua seems very pleased about that thought.

If someone pays to be added to StumbleUpon and it gets a bunch of positive votes, will those votes still count and keep the page popular once payment runs out?: Sure, if people like the page, it will start to rank naturally as well. You only pay for pages served through the ad system.

Is the StumbleUpon home page going to be refreshed more often? It seems kind of stale. Garrett says yes, it’s just that it’s not the main priority since most users get to content through the toolbar. And it’ll take some work to get algorithms in place to get fresh, relevant content going on the home page.

Joshua and Garrett have both gone from private lives to public lives. And with social bookmarking like this, some people are hesitant to reveal even the sites they are bookmarking in public. How do they feel about privacy? Joshua says people need to learn about privacy online, decide what they want to be public, and no how to keep online behavior private (with Del.icio.us, you can make bookmarks private). He says the downside to all of this is less privacy. The upside is that you can aggregate knowledge of many people. Is it worth the trade off? That’s up to the individual. And if you really care about privacy, don’t put information online. (I’ve thought a little about this online privacy thing before. It’s a conundrum.) He says that people have written in to complain that their bookmarks are public and he thinks, well, it is called “social bookmarking.”

Garrett notes that some people want levels of sharing and Joshua says this is good in that otherwise some people might not share at all, but on the other hand, if you make things too complicated, people won’t use them. Garrett says most people choose to share their stumbles.

Have they thought about unified profiles across social bookmarks? Well, Joshua says they don’t have a lot of sites exactly like them who they could integrate with. In fact, Yahoo MyWeb is their biggest competitor. Hey, that’s right. What’s up with that?

Tamar would like to star things she stumbles. I think Joshua might be thinking that she should just save it to Del.icio.us. Not that I’m trying to start a Xander and Harmony style Buffy fight with the two panelists or anything. OK, maybe.

All in all, a day chock full of social media tidbits. More social media goodness and live blogging tomorrow.

I’m back for more live blogging of SMX Social Media. This session is all about social bookmarking and tagging. You can categorize and share information using things like De.licio.us, StumbleUpon, and Technorati. This panel includes Guillaume Bouchard of NVI, Michael Gray of Atlas Web Services, and Neil Patel of ACS.

Coverage is also up at Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Roundtable.

Guillaume notes that you can leverage social networks. Once your story is on one, you may be able to use that to get to another. For instance, if your site is submitted to Digg, people might see it and bookmark it on Del.icio.us. He says things have gone way beyond just saving to favorites.

You can now share bookmarks with your networks. Sadly, most of these links are nofollowed, but by having your pages on these sites, you expose them to more people who might blog about them or otherwise link to them. You probably won’t get quite the traffic of social networking sites like Digg, but they are still worthwhile. These sites are used by traditional media, so using them can really pay off in that regard.

You should optimize tagging as much as possible. Research the popular tags and see what’s related to your industry. Del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites index tags exactly as you type them. For instance, if you enter “buffy, bunnies,” that will be indexed exactly as that and not as two separate tags: buffy and bunnies.

Manual tagging is not unlike anchor text for links. Make sure you’re using tags based on the keywords you want to optimize for. Automatic tagging tends to be more black hat. You can do more widescale tagging in this way. It’s often not useful for people, but just for search engines. Tags can be misused for spamming and he notes that search marketers just might be aware of making things too noisy.

Now we’re looking at Technorati. You can tag blog posts and Technorati picks up on this. You can claim your blog on Technorati and can encourage people to make it a favorite. You can add a widget to your site that readers can use to favorite your blog. Technorati doesn’t drive tons of traffic. For instance, even the most popular blogs only have around 3,000 people who have favorited them in Technorati. But you can use Technorati to gauge if your blog’s popularity is gaining or slowing down.

Flickr uses tags as well. And the comment links aren’t nofollowed, so go links! You can, for instance, submit a Flickr photo to Digg and can have a link to your site in the comments. You can use the photostream on your blog and other nifty things, although I’m not sure how these things drive you links or traffic. It’s all about popularity though, and everything helps, I suppose.

YouTube can drive tons of traffic. You can share videos, embed the videos into your site, and link back to your site in the description.

Now we’re looking at some site called Facebook. I think I may have heard of it. You can create a widget or group to drive traffic back to your site. You might also check to see if any groups exist about your company, so you can get involved in the discussion.

Michael is up next. He’s here to talk about Del.icio.us. He notes that you can add as many tags as you want. You can see how many people have saved a particular page and what notes they may have added. It’s interesting to see how people save your page and what they say about it. You can also do research to see how people tag pages that are similar to yours, so you can target those terms. It’s low-tech keyword research. Use the tags that are used most often.

You can see when people have saved something, which can tell you who bookmarked a page first. This may help you identify early adopters or people who are particularly interested in your subject matter.

You can subscribe to specific tags, which can help you keep track of your industry, see upcoming stories, and see what other people are doing that’s working.

You can send your friends network links, although the Del.icio.us network may not be the fastest way to send things.

The Del.icio.us home page shows what’s hot. You can see the active tags, which can help you know what’s hot right now. The popular page is where it’s at though. That’s where you get the traffic. Unlike Digg, Del.icio.us has people on it other than young, American, tech males, so you can use it to reach more people.

You can search over Del.icio.us, which returns first the results of things you’ve bookmarked, followed by the results that have been bookmarked the most. When you tag something, you can see tags you’ve used before, what tags Del.icio.us recommends, and the popular tags that others are using.

So how can you use Del.icio.us to drive traffic? Write about things that people are interested in. Find those who are active in your niche and add them to your network. Add bookmarking widgets to your site to encourage your readers to tag your stuff. Pay close attention to your titles, since those who end up linking to you are likely to use that title as anchor text.

The popular page is updated every four hours. Time your stories at lower traffic times so you have a better chance of getting on the popular page. You can see how many people have tagged a story “recently,” which is within that four hour window. You can use that to see how many people have to bookmark a story to get to the popular page for that update period.

Be careful with gaming the system. Del.icio.us may ban your account or start discounting your bookmarks. And no one wants that.

Next up, Neil is going to talk about StumbleUpon. It’s apparently one of the most popular social networking sites around. The home page displays popular stuff, as does the buzz page. Over 3 million users are on StumbleUpon and it can drive lots of traffic. It doesn’t do as well with getting links as some of the other sites, but the traffic is not only great, but continues over time. [To step away from live blogging for a second, I can vouch for the StumbleUpon traffic. When I have had a page of my blog on StumbleUpon, I not only get a traffic surge, but I get residual traffic for a really long time.]

StumbleUpon also has older users, which means they actually are old enough to have credit cards and can buy things without asking their parents.

You have to install the StumbleUpon toolbar to make use of it. You can use the toolbar to submit something, vote it up or down, or browse through things people have “stumbled.” You can also send links to your friends.

Titles aren’t as important as with other social networking sites, since users are browsing directly to the pages. You do want to make use of the tags and topics though, since that’s how users navigate through. As with the other social networking sites, you can see what the popular tags are so you can tag your stuff based on what people are looking for.

Neil’s now telling us how to spam your friends with links to your Stumbled page that requires your friends vote for your page. And on that happy note, we’re on to questions.

Someone wants to know more about finding out who bookmarked your stories first. Michael says it’s a lot of research, but you can find really influential people who like your stuff that way.

How do you pick a username? Michael Gray says he registers company names just so no one else can register them, but he doesn’t use those for his active account. Neil says he’s incognito. I’m sure that’s just to avoid stalkers.

How do you leverage friends? Mostly it’s easy to send links. Guillaume said he and his friends sometimes have social days where they all are at home on separate IPs, working the system. This can help you be seen as having an active account and not someone who’s just gaming. Michael says the sites can detect bots. Neil says that you’re in it for the long term, so doing really shady stuff that works in the short term can cause you more trouble in the long run.

Why does StumbleUpon bring such long term traffic? It’s not time sensitive like Digg. Mostly people use the toolbar to browse through what they’re interested in. Michael likens using StumbleUpon to channel surfing. You need a picture or something else interesting to get users to stop on your page.

Use automated script to submit? Michael says to experiment with your neighbor’s open wifi, because your IP can get banned.

What about buying StumbleUpon submissions? Those are tagged as paid and users ignore them. Just use your friend network.

Michael thinks that it’s possible that Google pays attention to what people are surfing to via the Google toolbar and since those with a StumbleUpon toolbar are likely to have a Google toolbar as well, then even if users stumble right on by, Google will see that as a page view, and that can’t be bad. (I have no idea if I’m using this “Stumble” terminology properly, so just humor me here.)

What about B2B sites? Use a lot of this social networking stuff to get the links, but probably not so much for the traffic.

Michael also notes that some people import their Del.icio.us bookmarks into their blogs, and unlike on Del.icio.us itself, those links are not nofollowed (how’s that for a double negative), so they may count towards PageRank calculations.

How do you get friends? You have to spend the time building up your network. Reach out to influential bloggers. Use a consultant who already has a friends network. Or hire someone internally to spend their time building up social networking profiles for your business. Particularly for sites with limits on how many friends you can add–pick people who are active, not those who rarely log on.

Now we take a break while Danny tries StumbleUpon. He likes cats and search engines and StumbleUpon eerily seems to work and serves up exactly that. He critiques the lack of lolcat speak in the cat picture. Seriously. If you make a picture of a cat speaking, make sure it speaks like a cat. Otherwise, the cat riding a shark underwater won’t be seen as credible.

Do search engines use Del.icio.us data in ranking sites? After all Google Webmaster Tools lists those links. Well, the links are nofollowed, so they don’t count for PageRank credit. [Another live blogging step aside -- I have it on good authority that Webmaster Tools lists all links, whether they count for PageRank or not.] But search engines may use those links for discovery purposes. Guillaume thinks that popular links may be noted by the engines. In any case, all the panelists figure it can’t hurt.

How can large companies capitalize on social media? It may not work, but it’s worth a try, particularly since it’s so inexpensive. It’s hard to calculate ROI, but then again, it’s hard to justify brand advertising too. At least this is more measurable. You can measure if you are getting traffic, links, or search rankings boosts.

Should you use the same username across all accounts? And do these profiles rank on Google? Michael says totally use them for reputation management, but you might also want to use separate accounts if you’re planning to submit the same content across all sites. Neil uses the same username since he can use the reputation he’s gained on one site to get instant trust on the other sites. Use the same avatar and description so people can recognize you and follow you across sites. Guillaume echoes what Michael said in that if you are doing things that are shady, if you use the same username across all sites, you might lose them all at once.

Danny is now using a Google search for “Steve Rubel” and notes that he’s working social sites for reputation management and is dominating the SERPs. I feel compelled to link to my blog post about using social networking profiles for reputation management again. Hey, it’s relevant; not spam!

And on that drumming-up-links-of-my-own note, we’re on to the next session.

StumbleUpon is a hot social discovery site that continues to rapidly increase in popularity. With the increase in popularity comes an increase in the potential traffic that it can drive to your sites. StumbleUpon has always been great at driving traffic and links, but lately I’ve started to notice that it is one of the leading social sites, often times sending more traffic than even Digg.

Most of the basic social media marketing tactics apply to StumbleUpon. It’s important to be an active user in the community who provides value and discovers great sites. It also helps to have a lot of mutual friends and people that will see your stumbles. However, there are some lesser-known tactics that can also help your stumbles become popular.

Pick the right topic. When you discover a site and submit it to StumbleUpon it asks you to pick a topic that you’d like to submit it under. It’s important that you pick the right topic for submission as this can literally make or break your stumble. If you submit to the wrong topic then people who stumble across that page will be less likely to give the page a thumbs up, as it might not fit the kind of content they’re looking for. By submitting to the right topics you will increase the number of relevant eyeballs that see the page and this increases the likelihood that they will give it a thumbs up. For example, if you’re submitting a site about surfing then submit to the surfing topic and not the general sports topic.

Use relevant tags. Just as picking the right topic for submission is important it’s also important that you assign the proper tags to your stumbles. Not only does this increase relevant stumbles but users can also search either on StumbleUpon’s site or using its StumbleUpon toolbar. It’s more likely they’ll discover your site if you use proper tags that accurately describe the page.

Get a little help from your friends. StumbleUpon offers a feature where you can send your stumbles directly to your friends. They will see a little red number next to the “stumble” button on their toolbar. This lets them know that someone has sent them a stumble and the next time they hit the button they will see that page. You can even send them a little message and they can reply back. This is a feature that you have to be careful not to abuse, and it’s very tempting to do so. Only send recommended pages to friends when you’re reasonably sure they’ll like the page. If you send too many it will annoy your friends and you’ll so no longer be friends. Trust me, I know. I’ve had a few people abuse this feature with me and after awhile I just deleted them as a friend.

Leverage groups and forums. StumbleUpon has groups for just about every topic you can think of and you can join up to 63 groups. Within some of these groups you have the ability to post relevant links for others in the group to see and discover. This feature is not available for all groups and can depend on the settings that the moderator sets for that specific group. The forums within the groups usually allow anyone to post links. Don’t spam them, though, or you can be deleted from the group by the group owner or moderator.

Create your own StumbleUpon blog. Did you know that can post HTML and images on your StumbleUpon blog? You can, and these help make your stumbles stand out to people that are browsing or stumble upon your profile. Not only can this increase your stumbles on certain pages but it can also help increase your friend count as others often friend people based on favorable impression from blogs.

Sometimes the little things can make all the difference for whether or not the pages you submit go popular. By taking a couple extra minutes to make sure you submit pages properly it will give you that extra edge and help you get more traffic and links to your site. Just remember, the content still has to be good and interesting to the StumbleUpon community.

Cameron Olthuis is director of marketing and design for ACS and writes regularly on social media issues through the company’s blog, Pronet Advertising. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

As expected, eBay has purchased StumbleUpon for about $75 million.

“StumbleUpon is a great fit within our goal of pioneering new communities based on commerce and sustained by trust,” said Michael Buhr, senior director, eBay. “StumbleUpon’s downloadable toolbar provides an engaging and unique experience to its users, but it is the similarities in our approaches to the concept of community that make it such a compelling addition to eBay.”

eBay reportedly bought StumbleUpon for their 2.3 million users community, who shares the discovery content based on personal preferences. More coverage over at Techmeme.

EBay Seeks to Add StumbleUpon to Portfolio from the Wall Street Journal brings back the rumors that eBay will be purchasing StumbleUpon.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the potential asking price is $75 million. However, when Chris Sherman interviewed Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, he said these were “just rumors.” An eBay spokesman told the Wall Street Journal the same thing that they do not comment on “rumors or speculation.” The rumors started with Techcrunch report back on April 18th.