I am on a Stumble kick… Originally, I thought that I registered back in April of this year, but as it turns out I actually created an account August of last year. Regardless though, I never really gave StumbleUpon a chance. Frequently, I was too busy with other things and never really had time to mess around with it. I am a very busy blogger. I have around the area of 100 dot Com blogs online. I don’t have too much time for fun stuff other than having fun blogging. It wasn’t until just a few days ago that I finally took the time to get familiar with StumbleUpon and to start discovering how it all works. Needless to say, I think I have become a StumbleJunkie and yes ,I did just register the domain name StumbleJunkie.com. I am also a domain name junkie. At any rate, StumbleUpon is very addictive and fun; however, there is one huge problem with StumbleUpon. I very quick to notice this right out of the gate. Look at this screen shot and see if you can figure it out:

The problem with StumbleUpon is that all the external links on your home page are not search engine friendly. In fact, search engines can not crawl them at all. The rel=”nofollow” tag has been attached to all external links. There are many reasons what StumbleUpon has chosen to do this; however, one thing is true: if you are a StumbleUpon member who stumbles sites, the sites that you stumble do not get any link love from you at all.

Now, I am not talking about traffic. When a page gets stumbled, that page will get quite a bit of traffic to it direct from stumblers. There is no doubt about that. What I am talking about is credit. I am talking about backlinks and giving the sites you stumble credit. I am noticing that quite a few StumbleUpon home pages have some pretty decent PageRank, but unfortunately all the external links on the page can’t be crawled and no link love can be given to the relevant content sources you have stumbled.

If you have a self hosted WordPress blog, you can change this. You can give out some link love to the sites that you love and have stumbled. Here is how:

• Login to StumbleUpon and go to your home page. Click the RSS icon on your web browser:

• Copy the URL and create an RSS widget in your WordPress dashboard/presentation menu. Paste the URL and then save the widget somewhere on your sidebar:

• Once you save the widget, you can now display up to the 10 most recent sites you stumble on your own personal blog. From your blog, you can now offer some link love to the sites that you have Stumbled. If StumbleUpon is too stingy to offer link love, then be a leader and do it yourself. People work hard on their blogs and web sites and if you like their pages, take things to a higher level… not only should you thumbs up their page(s) you should also provide them with a search engine friendly link that will ultimately lead to helping them increase their PageRank and rankings in most all major search engines.

• But wait!!! Let’s take things one step further. It’s all about love right? Well lets love everyone even more!!! Check this out… So far, I have shown you how to give a little bit of link love to the authors who work hard on their blogs and site… how about giving them a big kiss? Visit www.feedburner.com and create an account or if you already have an account login and burn your StumbleUpon feed in FeedBurner. Doing this now gives the author you stumbled not one but TWO search engine friendly sites that give them search engine friendly links to their blog or website:

If you use StumbleUpon, you obviously care about spreading the word about sites and blogs that you like. If you have a WordPress blog, more likely the sites that you stumble are sites that touch on topics that interest you. And 9 out of about 10 sites you stumble are about topics that you typically blog about on your own blog. And honestly, that doesn’t get any more relevant than that. You want to provide relevant links on your blog right? Syndicating your StumbleUpon RSS feed on your blog is a great way to provide relevant external links on your blog. Displaying relevant external links on your blog helps your blog grow. So why not take the extra step, show some like love and create a win / win situation for both yourself and the website you stumbled. Additionally, it only takes a few minutes to take the extra step and burn your StumbleUpon feed in FeedBurner.

If you are a Stumbler like me… and you discover that I have stumbled your blog, website or webpage, you will see this “G”. When you see my logo you can rest easy knowing that I:

1. Liked your content and gave you a thumbed up.

2. Submitted a paragraph review about the content found on the page.

3. Properly assigned relevant tags to your blog, website or webpage.

4. Added you as a friend.

5. Displayed a search engine friendly link on my personal blog.

6. Displayed a search engine friendly link on my Feedburner page.

If you use StumbleUpon, you should do the same.

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Related Keyword Tags: StumbleUpon, WordPress Hacks