User Comments

1. 

   8/31/09

   timethief

   Maybe this is a possible answer and maybe not. Sometimes bloggers research sites like stumbleupon and digg and reddit when they are preparing new articles for their own blogs. They do this to locate earlier articles on the same topic they are writing on, and they tend to link to authoritative articles that have received many votes, thumbs up, diggs, etc. in the new articles they publish. After they publish their new posts their readers may indeed click though to the authoritative articles linked to and this may lead to a re-enlivened stumbled post.

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2. 

   8/31/09

   ThriftShopRomantic

   Well, I've experienced what you're describing. But as for WHY it happens, I don't know. I believe you had mentioned on a previous thread that you see the stmp.stumbleupon server visiting your site for what looks like indexing?
   
   See, I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with that. I see the same thing. And occasionally, I'll get that burst of traffic from months-old posts.
   
   Maybe it's got some kind of calculation in there about the potential popularity/usefulness for particular posts?

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3. 

   8/31/09

   PetLvr

   I certainly have no clue, but have a few theories
   
   Firstly, it depends what your original post was discovered under which category and the tags that you used. When people thumbs up your page, those associated keywords are kind of scored in some way that other people who are looking for these topics (best if these keywords are actually topics that people can set up in their profile). People generally stumble in 3 ways, after a request, on the SU site, or by randomly clicking the stumble button. The random stumbles can be set to a global stumbleupon setting, but most likely it defaults to the stumbles of only your friends - not just of sites they've stumbled, but of categories, keywords, etc.
   
   So .. if you had a good run on SU before, chances are there are a lot of friends of yours who have those categories and other friends of theirs are randomly stumbling pages and your old page comes up in the queue as one they haven't seen before, so they get it in their browser. Now, if they like it - and thumbs up again, it can get popular (sometimes you see stars next to posts in your stumble favorites or review section) and, again, I have no clue how *that* works but I presume it has something with popularity and timing .. Maybe someone who saw your old post not only liked it, but passed it around. And, if it's more popular, it gets in the queue more often, and hence more traffic.
   
   This is all hypothetical theories of course, because I have no friggin clue how SU works. I always believed that proper discoveries in the right category and proper keyword tags help better organize the stumbles as well as having friends that can add weight to your stumbles prove the reason why SU is more popular than digg or reddit because it's not a 1-hit wonder, and can have recurring traffic results.
   
   Although, I'm just coming down from a 103F fever and it can all be in my head too.

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