About ethics: right or wrong?

SEO is a very elastic term for some people.
For those who don't read theBlogs, here's my thoughts on how to deal with keyword stuffing.
The basis is that appeals to ethics / morality / honesty are futile. That is clear from all the threads here that have discussed the issue of Search Gaming/Uber-'Optimization'.
Neither can/will LL assign sufficient human resources to enforcing good behaviour.
Automation as far as possible is a rational approach.


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Blog comment: -



I think I get the "high-quality destinations and listings will rise to the top of Search results"

Perhaps there would have been less huffing if this had been written as "high-quality .. listings will rise to the top of Search results"

Of course quality is largely in the eye of the beholder.What should rise to the top , within the bounds of search term relevance rules and ranking factors external to a parcel page, should be listings that conform to the guidelines.

The reality seems to be that the first stop response to gaming has to be technical. This is because of the scale of the task v. the available human resources to deal with it. For example, look at the Traffic bot situation. Without even looking for them, I see Traffic bots all over the place. LL could dedicate an employess full-time to zapping parcels, but it would be a manual whack-a-mole exercise.

SO:

What's a "high-quality listing" - in terms of how it can be identified by automation? It might be better to ask how can a low-quality listing be identified.

Keyword repetition is a prime indicator of low-quality listing. The particular structure of parcel pages makes gaming of keyword repetition very easy to detect - far easier than such gaming in normal Web pages.

The obvious sections for analysis are Parcel Name, Parcel Description and each of the Items in Search - treating each separate item as a section.

If I'm selling Widgets, how many times do I actually need to use the word Widget in any section? I would say "just once" - if I'm setting out to to "Appeal to Humans, Not Search Engines"

Sling's Widget Emporium

We sell widgets that do x,y,x.... best....wonderful. yadda....with superlatives and/or real differentiating information

* Flight assist Widget - Never goes up your bum after a TP
* Can opening Widget - It like, opens cans, 'n stuff - also rezzes work platforms, has a radar, and a sexy walk animation
* SEO Widget - Finds ways to game search without being punished

That's five sections to be analysed. Why would a human need to see the word Widget more than once in any one of those sections?



I would suggest that the detection of keyword stuffing should be on that very simple basis. I suggest that the "Appeal to Humans, Not Search Engines" guideline be savagely imposed.

There are people whose high ranking for their keywords is achieved by gaming. One such person has confirmed in the Forums that their response to a keyword-stuffing algorithm will be to determine the break-even point between benefits and costs. They will contine to game to the maximum achievable. For them it's a dog-eat-dog business. That's they way that they are wired.

Perhaps someone can come up with a valid reason for a single section as defined above to contain a keyword more than once. If I sell shoes, I sell shoes. I might sell footwear, boot, shoes, slippers but I don't sell shoes and shoes and shoes. I would list individual shoes as items, and naturally it would be advisable to describe them as shoes. A Human would see the word "shoe" and given a modicum of intelligence, would understand that a shoe was in question. It is doubtful that a person unable to grasp this concept would be aided by addition inclusion of the word "shoe" in the item description.



The nature of SL parcel pages makes it very easy to automate the detection of keyword repetition. There would be no harm and a lot of benefit if people could see what was going on. If for instance, you pre-process the parcel pages into the GSA, then have that process simply drop keywords that are repeated in a section (as defined above). The repetition is not rewarded and the search results displayed would make it clear to the parcel owner that the repeated words are being ignored. That will naturally drive parcel pagres towards a form - "Appeal to Humans, Not Search Engines"

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Since this has devolved into a Search thread, I'll go ahead and make an observation that's even more off-topic:

I'm slightly encouraged by something Liana said in the blog discussion: "Luckily, the Search Team has decades of information retrieval and search engine industry best practices to draw upon as we improve our ability to match a searcher's request to a quality result." (https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/65047#65047)

That phrasing suggests to me that LL hired some folks who know what IR meant before Google introduced very streamlined algorithms to index a corpus the size of the entire Web. The amazing thing is that those algorithms work at all--more than a bit of genius in that--but as we all know, that doesn't mean we should expect them to work everywhere, with any wish-and-a-prayer configuration.

So it's just possible Liana & team are up to the task. In a comment, I tried to taunt them into doing more than just tweaking around the edges of GSA, but who knows if they'll be allowed to do what's needed.

ethics - as a professional in RL, I tend to avoid doing anything 'unethical', insomuch as it would tarnish my good name. Unethical is not illegal or lying. Perhaps economical with the truth, but we all make judgements as to what the likely outcome will be, if we undertake unethical actions. There is always a payback. So the question really relates to whether you have any scruples, principles or indeed a conscience.

Scruples (a doubt or hesitation that troubles the conscience or that comes from the difficulty of determining whether something is right) hinders action, personally, not having done the right thing would not lie easily with me, I simply wasn't brought up that way. Ergo I would generally do the right thing in SL, within the regulations specified...........`

"Optimize" doesn't mean much in and by itself though because different people take it to mean different things.

If someone is hoping to win an election one way of optimizing their chances to win would be to kill the other candidates. Or bribe the voters, or rig the count, or... There are clearly acceptable and unacceptable ways to "optimize" which makes that word rather useless (even outside the range of illegal there are still ways to "optimize" an electoral position that might not be illegal but still is questionable).

There's also the issue that regular search isn't there primarily for stores' sake but to allow people to find what they're looking for (classifieds would be something that's there primarily for stores' sake).

If you sell tables and don't currently have that listed as a keyword and add it then people will have one more relevant result when they search for tables which is a good thing.

What isn't a good thing is when *you* have any direct control over *where* you'll appear in the results. You (this isn't a general you, not you you ) may claim that you're acting to help the "greater good" by gaming your ranking but you're not in any position to decide on that.

If you appear all the way at the end then it might be because that's where you are supposed to be, or it might mean that there's a problem with the ranking algorithm in which case that needs to be adjusted. Or it may mean that you need to push to advertise your store in other ways (classifieds, banner ads, participate in L$X "some"days or participate in a hunt, etc...). Anything but gaming search for your own *selfish* desires.

You (still general you) are hurting people when you manipulate your ranking, but it's not whoever you push down, it's everyone who uses search and now has to put up with a result that isn't relevant but was artificially forced to be relevant.

If I want to search by shop owners' ego I'll use classifieds, if I search anywhere else I expect unbiased results (in the sense that the results aren't the result of manipulation of an algorithm). If that's something that's so unacceptable than we may as well dump search altogether and just have classifieds only.

I'm sure GSA works very well when it's used to index things it was meant to be used for: full text documents. But when you unleash it on blobs of non-human readable text that are probably shorter then this entire paragraph it's bound to not perform very well at all (even leaving manipulation aside).

LL should allow every parcel far more space for a description (or any other kind of information people might want to list) *and* leave ranking up SL-specific metrics that make sense for the category is listed for (for stores that would be a combination of "foottraffic" and visited after seaching for XXX and ended up buying something yes/no; for hangouts it would be a combination of traffic/amount of people plus traffic at a given point so you could get relevant results for US/EU/Aus timezones if you feel like it).

(And of course add item searching in addition to parcel searching)

Well, the thread is the child of a Search Thread, and the grandchild, and the ...

My rationale for cross-posting the Blog comment was in the preface to it. - "The basis is that appeals to ethics / morality / honesty are futile."

It's clear that there never will be common agreement on what is moral / ethical / honest.
We even argue over the meaning of the words.

I understand your thinking but it doesn't altogether say that to me. I have a decade of seo experience all by myself, which necessarily includes 'best practises'. All it means is that I know the various seo techniques and can successfully perform seo. Data retrieval is different, of course. The two together should allow them to come up with, or spot, seo methods that LL doesn't want, and programme to deal with it. It doesn't mean that they are able to produce a spiffing good search system. Information retrieval and knowing what best practises are doesn't add up to the ability to make a good search system.

Apart from that, their hands are tied in that they can't modify the GSA code so they are left with chunky external additions, as they've always had to use. For instance, I expect the way they'll deal with keyword-stuffing is a simple word count method that is performed on each page, external to the GSA system. Each page will be given a score (I think embedded in the pages themselves), and the score can be used by the GSA system to partially or fully prioritise the rankings. The degree of finesse in doing the word count would make a big difference but this is LL, and I expect it not to have a high degree of finesse about it.

You still sell copyright violations.

That's your idea but you don't know that.

SEO in GSA v6 goes something like:
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK
CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK

I gues you could say GSA v6 SEO will be mostly done by hiring bot nets now.

But is it ON by default and is there an option to turn it off?

Also, it's Google's work and they know very well that simple click counting doesn't work. There was a web search engine called Direct Hit that incorporated click-throughs into the ranking algorithm and it didn't take long for the engine to be shut down. It needs more finesse than simple click counting to work in a useful way, and I would think that Google included some finesse. BUT...

The GSA isn't designed to be a web search engine and it wasn't written with the expectaion of being spammed. So it may just be simple click counting.

If it is on by default, or turned on, then it could make quite a meal of the rankings. There's the problem of the rich getting richer and the poor never making it off the floor. I.e. those at the top get the clicks while those low down get none. The way that Direct Hit dealt with the problem was to give new sites an artificially high ranking. If they got enough click-throughs, they wouldn't drop so far when the artificial period was up.

It'll be interesting to see what LL do with v6.

That's one test. Another one is, "How would I feel if someone did this to ME?"

You aren't exactly an impartial moderator, sharing Phil's "if it's not against the rules..." view, vocally and repeatedly.



They have. That you disagree with them is not the same as they never explained. Please also consider that the arguments here are very old and the personalities already hostile, so a clear, concise, polite and well-reasoned explanation is not forthcoming.



"Trying not to harm anyone in the process" is also an ethic. I am of the opinion that Phil does not share this one, important ethic.

Actually, you said as much. I asked you long ago if you had permission from the artists to sell reproductions of their work, and you said you did not. Or maybe you don't consider that a copyright violation?

Off topic I know, but I've amended that one to
* Flight assist Widget - Goes up your bum *before* a TP

You are a person of many negative opinions and you have no evidence to support that particular one, and at least one of the others you've expressed here. I think you just like posting such negative stuff to get your jollies.

I did, didn't I. I forgot about that. In which case, you ought to have written, "From what you told me a year ago..." or something like that. You don't know one way or the other if what you wrote is true. But then, truth isn't your strength, is it?

This is true, but most religions have a form of, "Do unto others what you'd have done unto you." That could be a good basis for the rest.

I don't follow. I based what I said on your words, and you now remember and acknowledge saying those words, but you still claim I don't speak the truth?

Do you or do you not think the artwork you sell is a copyright violation?

I said that you lied about something quite different - and you did.

Wouldn't you like to know

Umm LL have not said paying for picks is gaming, they might mean that but they haven't said that at all, they've said abusing picks is gaming, you're assuming they mean paying for picks, I'm assuming they mean firing up an army of alts and managing to get them all counting in picks.

That doesn't matter, I hoped for a general discussion about ethics in regard to SL. If I wanted it to be about Phil I would have posted it in the other thread.

My main objective is/was to get some more understanding of the fact that ethics can be different among different groups of people. Resulting in the understanding that calling people names just because they have a different viewpoint towards 1 or 2 ethic values, doesn't make too much sense. I failed apparently.

Still, saying to someone they are morally bankrupt because they do not share the same opinion about something, is wrong and is a personal attack no matter how you wrap it.

As I remember, I used the term way back to apply to a general group of people who were gaming search through traffic-botting.

Some people took offence, seeing that as a direct attack on themselves.

I used the term, not because they did "not share the same opinion about something", but because they were involved in a dishonest activity.

Note that LL has since then banned Traffic Botting and are moving against other gaming techniques.
It the case of Traffic Botting, LL described the practice as unfair.



LL is not given to use strong language in the course of Corporate communications. We can assume that the use of the word "unfair" was an exercise in restraint.

If anyone takes offence at me describing traffic-botters as morally bankrupt, cheats, dishonest, etc. well that 's just tough. There are not many polite terms that can be used to describe dishonest cheating behaviour.

*We* can do no such thing. Individuals, such as yourself, can fool themselves all the day long, of course.

I'll go along with that provided you don't take offense if I call you a dickhead, idiot, toerag, and other such things. Is it a deal?

I think that anyone who reviews your posts over all of these threads will find that you have continued to direct a stream of personal abuse at me. There are pages and pages of it. It's your classic style. It's juvenile. Someone in another thread gave a few small samples of it today.
The terms that you use above are simply intended to be offensive. The terms that I generally used are actually descriptive of behaviour. Dishonest, cheating, gaming, etc.

I take no offence whatsoever. I have no respect for you. I never had from the first time I saw you posting in defence of Traffic-botting.