I’ve recently seen a couple posts over at PandemicBlogs about the dangers of self Stumbling.  Their initial post was about why you should not Stumble yourself, and their more recent post addressed the what they view as a problem with Stumble (the algorithm). Taken strictly at face value, and looking at it with an evil eye, I have to wonder if there is the potential for less than honorable competitors to Stumble you to death?

I’m not advocating this, nor am I saying it is possible.  However, a comment from Kimota in the first post got me to thinking… is it possible for someone to Stumble a competitor’s site so that they their traffic drops. It sure is a crappy thing to do, but given some of the things I’ve seen over the years on the net, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. The characteristics of the competitors would seem to have to be something like:

• Not an A-List blogger or top site, as one would assume that they would have enough positive Stumbling going on to counter any lame attempt
• A blog or site that was competing in a big affiliate space, as why would even a jerk waste time on an attack unless they were trying to make money.

How would an attacker do this?  Well, according to the comment, Kimota experienced a drop in traffic and the inability to self submit after triggering some type of self-submit flag for his site. Taking the leap that the self submits were the cause and that there were no other significant factors in play. If this is truly the case, a Stumbler might start Stumbling this competitor’s site as soon as articles or products were added. Based on other comments about the algorithm possibly identifying networks of Stumblers, one might also add a group of Stumblers to this network to make the submissions look more suspicious.

I can’t truly see this being successful on any grand scale. I even have to wonder why anyone would see it as a viable plan. However, I am fairly confident that some people have at least experimented with it. To me though, it would seem that the effort to do this would offer a larger return if it went in to working on your own sites. And of course, I am talking only about Stumble traffic.  I would assume that all social networks would have to deal with some similar issues though as they work to police self submission.

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