About ethics: right or wrong?

LL know which side their bread is buttered on. Stores on whole Sim pay them enough tiers, not to mention use of the Lindex, classifieds, uploads etc

Same with someone who drops 200k for a Classified advert and uses false keywords.....you think LL are going to ban them for that offence.....you must be joking! 200k a week....hell no!!

Grinko bank ran off with 500K USD (that's USD).....what did LL do?

How about the some of the historical practices of some the largest Estate Barons? You think LL will delete Dreamland estate?

Money talks my friend.....just like RL.

You are assuming that all the repetitions within an item will count equally towards ranking.
LL say that they will be looking for word-stuffing on an automated basis. The simplest entry-level approach to what you propose there is to ignore repeated words in ranking.

The rules are deliberately vague. LL learnt that lesson during the sto-go Ad-farm fiasco.

The words I actually used were, "I'm not convinced of that, and I have the means to test it". That leaves a lot of wiggle room for being wrong, acknowledges that I'd have to test my suspicion, and makes the claim that I *can* test it. Nothing more.

As to what I'm able to test, you might pay better attention to the quote I was responding to. All of it. You've jumped to conclusions.

And if you haven't figured it out, I'll say outright that this is just a hunch. When things don't make sense and the personalities of the players offers a solution, I tend to get these hunches. They're just that until I gather more info. That's why I used the words, "I'm not convinced", and not "No fucking way". As to why I place so much stock in these hunches, I'll consider sharing my RL experience. Maybe.

I think that the text that you are referring to is around the words "any" and "artificial".
I believe that this is clearly vague
i.e. it is intended to be vague so as to give LL scope to hit *anything* they didn't like the look of.

LL don't have to entertain your semantics on the meaning of "artificial". They can just whack you if they consider that you are gaming.

At the end of the Ad-farm excitement, Jack had come around to the "We'll know it when we see it" way of putting things.
That was real tough on the bad guys.

Sling, I am not sure LL will thing the bad guys are the same people you think the bad guys are.

There's one sure way of finding out.
This move on search-gaming has taken years. We can wait a bit more.
Well we have to

No doubt there will be much screaming by all sorts of interests.
Some will say it's to harsh. Some will say it not enough. Some will be screaming FIC.

Some people will be posting "Can I have your stuff?"
They won't get the stuff, because (1) the person isn't really leaving and (2) maybe most of it is noTrans.

As I said, you have no idea what will happen after the change. You imagine the risk of a penalty for me, but you have no idea. I said that I would test it, but you seem to imagine more, plus your flights of fancy imagine penalties when the blog says something different.

Why would I ever think that I've found a grey area? I've never found one in the past, and I don't imagine that I'll find one in the future. There are no grey areas except in meanings.

Ok. I misunderstood what you wrote. It sounded like you were talking about including keywords right up to the limit.


Apparently not you. Didn't you grasp that they will programmaticaly deal with keyword-stuffing so that such pages drop down the rankings, which is quite different to the flat out penalties you keep going on about. Of course, that's the only sensible thing for them to do.

Automate the effect of keyword -stuffing - not automated penalties. But I'll read it again to make sure I didn't misunderstand it.

They will take action against things they need to take action against, but keyword-stuffing will be dealt with in the rankings and won't require any direct action.

I've read it again:-

See?

LOL. There's no wiggle room for you. You said that you have the means to test it, and you've been challenged to do just that, but you backed away. You're just hot air.

There was no jumping to conclusions. You said that you were not convinced that none of my Picks are gamed, and that you have the means to test it. There's no wiggle room for interpretations. It was perfectly clear. Just hot air, that's all.

Oh, nobody is disputing that you don't believe certain things. You can believe exactly what you want to believe. It's not a problem and I wouldn't seek to make you believe anything different. I'll tell you the turth but I won't insist that you believe it. It's just that you you claimed to have the means to test it, and you were challenged to do exactly that and report your findings. But you won't/can't because you're scared of what you'll find.

I'm not interested in your RL experience. I already have enough of your RL experience here to know that you have wrong hunches. I've only seen two of them and you haven't got one right yet.

Wow- if i were you I would keep stumm.....not an opinion to be bragging about. Its just wrong on so many levels!

Not bragging at all, just my take on it.

Don't like it? I really don't care.

Wow 3 RL businesses, contract work in SL , this work that work.....yet so much time to preach ethics day in and day out on RA Forums! They must have changed the clock ....to a 28-hr day!

Yep, and when all the honest merchants walk off to other worlds which actually, you know, have and enforce rules of good business ethics, they sure will know then which side their bread ISN'T buttered anymore.



You'd be surprised what LL will do, no matter the cost. You think the OpenSpace fiasco mattered with all those people dropping them left and right when they changed all that? Lots of people left who were paying a boatload of tier. Sucks.

Remember gambling? Oh, I am sure you do; you keep bringing it up. Any idiot can see the hit LL took over that one.



Banned all illegitimate banks? What about it?



If Dreamland gives them enough cause, I have no doubts they will do just that.



Yes, it most certainly does; you just have to hope your money talks louder than everyone else's. In a lot more cases than you realize (or would be willing to admit if you did), it doesn't.

I know it! I am just the most amazing person in the world!

Thanks for your acknowledgment and support!

You must have missed reading a few of my posts. I already described how you cannot see product info in a "low prim furniture" search, or "furniture" search, for that matter.
I'll explain again:
On the first page you will see the word Furniture listed over and over again on the parcels that pull up on first page.
NONE of that product is for set for sale. It is simply labeled to take advantage of the words. You cannot see what products they have for sale in the rest of the store, by using that first page. Did you pull it up? Are you telling me that I am "pissing into the wind", without looking for yourself? You tell me. Pull it up. Do you see product listed there?

I use some of the search pages successfully as a merchant. I do not use it successfully as a shopper. And I cannot use a "general" search page successfully as a merchant. Only very specific searches, and that's what I focus on. Now....you will say that if I use it successfully as a merchant, than it must be successful for shoppers. A handful. Any time you can grab a handful - that's fine - it's still success. But it's not the end all be all.

I think that if those first few pages were not being tweaked the way they are....and I make no ethics claim here....I leave that up to the merchant....and if those pages had real product listed, then the success factor would be much higher....and customer shopping satisfaction would be much higher....which pays off for everyone across the board.

I don't think that people "worry" about them. I think they just get aggravated and pissed. I ran a thread for you, asking how people search. It probably got lost....but some people were nice enough to respond. Read it.

/327/aa/360098/1.html

I suppose I should just keep my mouth shut, and let people shoot themselves in the foot with it.

Again....I think you are placing very little value on what your shoppers' needs are (such as convenience)....and I think that you are placing very little value on their intelligence....to say that they cannot see what is going on, and that it does not effect them.

Qie- there are a ton of foreign keywords in ALL search....and growing each day. When i optimise, i also test foreign keywords in about 5/6 languages to see how popular they are at the moment. If i find they're popular.....i will use it. This is all part of the extensive SEO process...which takes hours to go through all combinations and variants plus the most popular foreign keywords. (Kitty & Talarus seems to think it takes a few minutes though.......that's the difference between being near the top of Page 1...or languishing on page 15!) Every different keyword has the potential to bring in extra traffic including those popular Foreign ones.


It's for that reason, i don't do the "FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE" type thing, as i prefer to focus on a variety of targeted keywords.....and because there might be several different keywords, by its very nature i have distribute any repetitions, which then makes my Page a little less keyword stuffing in appearance than some other Businesses.

I've been use Foreign keywords for nearly 2 years in All Search...with even more emphasis nowadays. I have been making classified adverts in foreign languages for nearly 3 years now.

PS Your comment here "believe me about this: there are many here for whom English is a *foreign* language, who don't speak or write it at all, and use the viewer in their own language." <---------------Mickey take note!

PPS Japanese Creators are awesome!!


.

With stagnant growth over the last 6 mths....with more sims being sold than bought....i'd say LL wouldn't be too keen in say wiping over 1000 Dreamland sims ...especially after their backhanded deal taht allowed them to purchase Homesteads at grandfathered rates!

i think a lot of LL decisions are money based.(or biased)..which i is unfortunate. They'd sooner hit soft tragets, quite often the small guys.....yet someone that owns a few Sims seems to be given a lot more leeway for similar type of offences.

The gambling ban, LL had no choice but to go ahead with it.......otherwise there possibly wouldn't be an SL right now.

Some do...but many don't...they click directly what they see on the ranking pages and what they read in the Land Description lines....and then straight onto the TP button directly to location. It's the same way as if TP'ing from Classifieds or People Search (via Picks/ Classifieds) or Places Search. If people really want that more detailed information.....they'd be better off hopping onto Xstreet searches, where they can view photos and read Product descriptions. Yep...I still think, you're pissing in the wind. For one my traffic, Phils traffic and Marcel traffic would have dropped like a stone if keyword stuffing were such an ogre.....none of us are reporting reduced traffic.

One important fact.....it is LL that created this mess, when they changed the weightings or emphasis to Keyword density......prior to that (15 mths worth), Pages for products were quite presentable and informative.

Of course automation as far as possible is what they have to do. They don't have the human resources to do it manually. I've already said many posts ago.

What you miss is that they say that *any attempt to.....*
A gamer who stuffs keywords right up to the limit is always at risk of their activity being reviewed by a human.
The gamer might argue that because of the automation, that level of stuffing has LL's blessing.
The gamer might think that if a human reviewed their page, that the human would disregard the keyword stuffing on the basis that the automation had reduced the benefit. That's wishful thinking.

Then you know that they are dealing with keyword-stuffing by causing such pages to drop down the rankings and not by penalising them or the people by hand. And yet you go on and on about penalties, and how I will be risking penalties. For some reason you seem to like waving non-existant penalties over people.

Sling. It's obvious that you can't imaging how keyword-stuffing can be dealt with programmatically - hence the "wishful thinking" comment. I'm sorry that you are unable to figure it out by yourself, but it's not your fault - it's just your lack of programming knowledge. As a matter of fact, if you'd read and digested what's been written already in this forum about it, you'd at least have a grasp of how it will be done. OR...

Perhaps you have grasped it but you enjoy writing stuff that you believe isn't true, just for the sake of it. That's quite likely, actually.

Incidentally, you don't do "automation as far as possible" with something like leyword-stuffing. What you do either works ok or it doesn't work ok. If it doesn't work ok then it'll be changed until it does, or it will be abandoned in favout of hand penalties, both of which are for the future, not the present or very near future. What I'm saying is that keyword-stuffing detection isn't hit and miss - it doesn't catch some but miss others. It catches all, up to the levels that it's programmed to catch. I'm assuming that LL have competent programmers on it, of course.

.....................................

As for the guy who believes that sexual activity/depictions between pixel characters that include child characters, he lost all credibititly for anything concerning morality and SL. He didn't just shoot himself in the foot - he shot both his feet clean off.

With this posting I say goodbye to the thread I started myself.

To me it is clear that a few people just do not want to understand, something that does not come as a surprise. Myself, I know what my boundaries are and will keep on operating within them. And to speak with talarus words: Who cares?

As long as I keep within the limits set by LL, there is nothing to worry about. And to be honest, the fact that a handful of people will not shop at my place... well I could not care less. One canot please everyone, and I rather have the revenue that I have know with a clean conscience, then conform myself to the ethics of a few forum people and loose half that revenue

To wrap some things up before I leave here:

I do understand where for example Sling and Kitty are coming from. And I respect their feelings of course, even though I think they are not realistic enough. As someone trying to run a successful business, I have to deal with reality, not with idealism. Because Idealism doesn't even pay for the hundreds of dollars I pay each month for tiers, rent and promotional activities.

One of Slings best posts about this (in my opinion at least) is where she concluded that when faced with competitors that use methods you do not really like, you have 2 choices: Join the arms race or choose the idealistic way.
Now the reason I started this thread, is to clarify a bit that what is right or wrong, is not the same for everyone. And as long as the methods used in the arms race are not wrong to me, I choose to join. Simply because that does benefit my business a lot more then going the idealistic way, without conflicting with my ethics.

The fact that a good handful of people agreed with Phil, Rene and myself regarding for example picks, shows that things are not that black and white. It is not that we are just 3 evil business people, there are at least as many people agreeing with us, then there are opponents to our views. Yet to bring things into perspective: We are talking about a dozen people really active in these discussions. Completely irrelevant of course in the big picture.

And now... I am going to focus on my businesses, this has already taken up too much of my time. Maybe I see you people inworld some day, who knows, maybe even in one of my stores

Your MO of taking selected words and building them into misinterpretations that suit you is getting so old that it's funny.

If you look back, you will see that the "automation as far as possible" is the general approach that LL have to take to all forms of gaming. I have said that is the only rational approach given the volume and the human resources.
It is also clear that I have read and understood that LL will automate the reduction in ranking.

Of course I understand how it is possible to pull text from the parcel database and build pages.
I understand how the contents of a database may be parsed.
I do this in my RL work. I write software to do it.

I understand that LL generate parcel pages from a database. I understand how they do it.
I understand that a modified version of the pages can be fed to a black box indexing. I understand how the resulting index can point to the original pages.
I understand that a parsing of the pages can be used to set flags and psuedo-pages that can influence ranking.
Rumour has it that they have employed people who can handle that sort of task well.
SL parcel pages (for instance)
- are all structued in exactly the same way
- are very well organised for parsing
This really eases the job of working with them


What you, being a gamer fixated on "the rules", seem determined not to realise is that the automated reduction in ranking is not the end of the story.
You have stated your intention to keyword stuff right up to whatever level is the break even. Other people will do that too. For the most part, if that's all they are doing, then nothing much will happen. Too many people will be doing it for LL to police. All LL can realistically do is spot-check and wind down the triggering levels as far as possible without impacting word repetitions that are actually natural in context.
They can simply nullify the effect of repetition in the page versions fed to indexing - a simple passive aproach.
They can generate a negative scoring - an active approach requiring more logic.



The logic of "under the radar" keyword stuffing exposing a gamer to penalty is this:
If a human looks at the page, *any* level of keyword stuffing will taint everything. The page will "smell", and the stuffing will add to the weight of any other gaming attempts to be seen.
Where something that *might* be a gaming attempt is seen, the presence of any level of keyword stuffing in the page will swing the judgement towards *is* a gaming attempt.
The low level of stuffing, even if it flies under the automated radar, will expose the parcel owner to penalty for the overall gaming attempt.

Alright, Sling. You do understand how LL will operate the keyword-stuffing part, so I don't understand why you keep going on about the penalties that I'll risk getting if I do it. There won't be any, other than my pages dropping down the rankings, which isn't a penalty in the sense that we mean by penalties.

There is something that you definitely don't understand - because I didn't expound on it at the time...

My intention is not to stuff for the sake of it - that may not be possible, considering that all the natural descriptions in my items may/probably already cross to where it is programmatically seen as stuffing. If I include all 1000 items in the page, and they all have "A Prim Savers low prim furniture product" in their descriptions (as they have done naturally since before the GSA came along), the page may be programmatically seen as keyword-stuffed, even though it's perfectly natural and not intentionally stuffed at all. So I will need to find out how far I can go. I'm certainly not going to change the items' descriptions for the sake of it - only if I have to.

If I find that my page's rankings drop when the change comes, I'll experiment with keyword content to get it back up again. It's obviously going to drop because of the stuffing it currently contains, so I'll have to experiment to get it back up and, in doing that, I may overstep the numbers/levels and therefore get an idea of them.

That's what I meant when I said I would be pushing to see how far I could go. I expect my rankings to drop, so I expect to be experimenting with keyword content to get it back up again. What I didn't mean is that, if I get to #1 or #2, I'll still add more and more of the keywords just to find out how much the system will swallow. I'm not really interested in that - not enough to do the tests, anyway. Considering my items' descriptions, I imagine that I'll have to remove natural keyword instances rather than add them.

So, if you've been thinking that I'll be adding and adding to find the limits, you misunderstood - I won't. I'll be pushing to get the rankings back, and that's likely to need keyword instance reductions to below the natural (descriptions) level, rather than increases. But either way, that's what I'll be doing and, in doing it, it's likely that I'll find some information about the levels.

My point about any level of keyword stuffing exposing a gamer to penalties was a general one. Maybe at this stage you can agree that it's valid. The human review would be a bit like a court action works. The lawyers on either side seek factors that would damage the credibility of the other side. Judges are influenced by the balance of credibilities as pure legal points don't clear up conflicts of evidence.. Any level of word-stuffing will damage the credibility of a page, inviting a penalty.
ETA:
Of course in the case of a Linden reviewing a page for possible gaming attempts, the defendant doesn't have a lawyer present
ETA-end


The issue of natural repetition of words in context is a problem
I wrote: "All LL can realistically do is spot-check and wind down the triggering levels as far as possible without impacting word repetitions that are actually natural in context."

Natural repetition v. artificial repetition is an issue.

What I have suggested to LL is that they index on a version of the pages in which repetitions have been stripped.
A problem with that is that it would interfere with phrase searching.
A benefit of that is that it would allow people to have the sort of item branding that you mention to their heart's content without this having an artificial effect on ranking
It calls for some form of hybrid. Index on one body - Rank on another.


I hadn't assumed that you would be adding stuffing. There is enough stuffing in your current page to melt down even the most laid back of filters.
I had assumed that you would remove the 100% stuffing non-product listings as a first step, and reduce from there until you find the break even level.

I accept your 'general' view of it. It's that you applied it a lot to stuffing, and I've been pointing out that it won't be applied to stuffing because LL is dealing with that automatically. (I got fed up of typing "keyword-stuffing" all the time, so it's just "stuffing" now).

A similar thing has happened with traffic bots. Even though a G-team Linden can clearly see that a box of bots are traffic bots, s/he can't touch them at the moment if the bots are registered, because they will be handled programmatically. G-team people aren't going to view an html page, decide it to be stuffing, and penalise someone because of it, when the system itself deals with stuffing.

That reminds me an awful lot of the suggestion I sent to the search team quite a while back - where people could optimise a page to their hearts content, and the rankings are done on that page, but the 'proper' page (listed items, etc.) is the only one that can be seen by people. I know your idea is a bit different, but it does remind me of it.


The current stuffed page will change completely, of course. That goes without saying. Every item/prim on the page will be removed, and it will go back to how it was before - a list of items for sale, plus some heading and line space prims, which make the page better and easier for users (item type groupings). Then I will look at its rankings and consider what needs to be done. I imagine that I'll have to change some item descriptions to start with to reduce the number of "low prim furniture" instances. Heh! The page could get flagged as stuffing for the number of "Prim Savers" instances that it contains, and probably will. Now that will be a silly effect.

You may not want to believe it, but I *really* disliked doing the stuffing, so much so that I only did it bit by bit and I tried to leave as many useful listings for people as I could each time. I disliked it enough that I wrote to LL about it and suggested an alternative. But the desire for the business to continue its success trumped my dislike of stuffing - and rightly so.

It's a problem for all search engines.

A problem I see with your idea is that removing all but one instance of each word would largely destroy ranking by relevance which, of course, is *the* big plus with Google systems. If all pages can only have one instance of the word 'furniture', then the only differentiation between all of those pages is the total number of words on the page, so that the word "furniture" comprises different density percentages, which isn't very good for ranking by relevance. It would also mean that non-furniture places, that include the word 'furniture' somewhere in the page, would be on equal footing with furniture places. A rough way round it would be to leave a number of instances on each page, according to the word's density level on the orginal page, but that would be very rough.

There's one thing about all search engines that applies here. They don't care about individuals, so if a top skin store doesn't appear high in the rankings because its page unintentionally triggered the "stuffed" flag, LL doesn't care - and I agree with that. It means that LL is unlikely to get into the kind of detailed programming that Google gets into, for instance. They are far more likely to have a simple count system that triggers a flag, and let the rankings fall where they may, provided that the triggering level, which should be adjustable, produces relevant results at the high end of the rankings.