Paid Stumbleupon traffic and Google

[diberry]

I've searched the forum, and I can't find anywhere that this has been discussed. I have a site that used to do quite well in StumbleUpon, but got hit hard by Penguin (no penalty, just badly affected on many queries), and lost the Stumblers seemingly as a side effect of losing the Google traffic.

Stumble offers "paid discover", where you can pay to have your URL put in the normal stream of sites people are stumbling. I would happily pay for this and see how it works, but I'm wondering if Google can detect this and how they view it. I don't see that it's really any different from Adsense, but then I'm baffled by how Google defines "paid traffic" or "paid links" sometimes.

Has anyone tried this (or a similar model with another company), and if so, did it seem to make any difference to Google?

Note: I realize Stumble doesn't help my SEO. I just want the visitors, because they convert on this particular site. I'm pursuing targeted traffic, not rankings.

[aristotle]

From what I know, Stumbleupon shows your site's page in a frame on their site, so that the "visitor" doesn't actually come to your site. Also, I once did an analysis of the "visitors" from stumbleupon to one of my sites, and found that most of them just take a brief look and then go to the next stumble, so there's much less engagement than with real visitors. I suspect this would be even worse with paid discovery. So it's hard to know exactly how Stumbleupon "visitors" would affect your Google rankings, but in my opinion the result would be more likely to be negative than positive.

[LavingRunatic]

I've tried paid discovery a few times and not had any success. No ad clicks. No facebook shares. Now, maybe my content is poor, but I don't think so.

As aristotle mentioned, the site does visit yours in an iframe. However, when I look at my GA, I see Stumbleupon as a referrer so yes, Google does see it. I don't think it matters, but I see what you're saying...perhaps the brief "time on page" could have an effect.

[Bewenched]

Somehow I feel a bit distrustful of sites putting my site in an iframe.
A few years ago we had a site that was using our pages in that manner and they started out ranking us for our own pages, at that time Google somehow thought our content in that iframe was their content.

I always use a frame buster script.

[aristotle]

Another problem with Stumbleupon is the poor targeting. Most users aren't searching for infomation about a specific subject, and if your page doesn't immediately grab their interest, they go to the next stumble.

[alika]

Stumbleupon can bring big traffic (never tried the paid ad though). In our case, average stay is only 32 seconds, and the most pages/visit is 1.15.