Is something wrong with traffic?

I run a business in second life and alot of our sponsorships and fan base comes from traffic counts, and for the last week or so we've been having tons of people on the land but traffic hasn't reflected at all. In fact, yesterday we had 3 hours where we had 50+ people on the land. Our traffic totalled at 8.9k. While I normally could care less, a competitor has started a petty war over traffic so I figure we can beat them at their own game. However, we easily should have pulled in 20k traffic with us having at any time atleast 15-20 people on the sim, all the way up to 65.

So, is there any way to check exactly how traffic is counted? I know the rule is that they have to be on for 5 minutes before it counts, and it's 1 point per minute per person, I've read all the info, but I want to know if I can see exactly how that number came about because something obviously is wrong here.

Can't wait until traffic disappears all together...wasn't that supposed to happen a few months ago anyway?

Traffic is a pile of pants, the best way to use traffic is to see if you make improvements under your own marketing, as a comparison of popularity it's an epic fail.

Oh, if only. No, LL once again listened to the pro-traffic folks. I don't recall them ever officially saying that Traffic was going to be excluded from the Search rankings, so I don't think they ever had to officially un-say it.

One interesting new development in real SEO is Google's move to rank search results by page load time. I think that's what we should do with SL Search rankings now: run a botted viewer at each List-In-Search destination and measure the time between arrival and the point all textures and sculptmaps have loaded. Shortest times get highest ranking.

Well, again, we take traffic numbers to sponsors so I was hoping to show after our show yesterday the huge traffic number we had and it came it really low, which is what surprised me. I hate traffic, I wish it didn't hold as much power as people give it, but because it does, I need to find out why we had a very obvious difference, considering 50 people on a sim for an hour SHOULD be 3000 traffic...for 3 hours, that already gets 9k, not including the rest of the time people were on the sim.

Ugh, this just pisses me off, because I was hoping to bring some high numbers after our show.

Traffic figures are updated only periodically, not immediately. It's hard to tell exactly when, but something like once every day or two for a 24 hour metering period, but it's not clear *which* metering period. I often see the traffic number stay the same for a day or two at a time at a fairly busy club in the 15-18K range. It would be highly unlikely to hit the same exact traffic count twice in a row when it is that high, so I'm pretty sure it is just not updated on those days.

Something is wrong for sure. Yesterdays updated traffic calculations dropped by 10,000 for everyone ,. Some seemed to have updated fine today and others have not..
Sighs

I am so sick of hearing "we have a lot of traffic " or " We have VIP group with 1000s of members" Both these statements are rather meaningless. How often do you go to these places and fine them empty or bots sitting there.

Let your place speak for itself and forget about the others. If its good ppl will come if not they will spread the word

1) Drop people in a bland skybox
2) Provide a teleporter to the actual store
3) Profit

The only real way to rank pages for a set of keywords is to determine whether or not other people found what they were looking for per returned result. The one with the highest success rate is the one who'll be most "relevant" to the average person searching for that/those same keyword(s).

For stores people remain only a relatively short time but if the result was relevant they end up buying something. If they tp away without buying it wasn't relevant.
For social places people will stick around for a relatively long time if the place ends up meeting their expectations or they'll tp away within a few minutes and it wasn't a relevant result.

Yeah, I thought of that: rez times could be for each Show In Search item on the parcel, too... if they hide those away, they'll never sell anything. (Well, except to people daft enough to still try to use Search/Places and wander aimlessly around a store.)

What about social places? They don't necessarily have anything to sell so an enclosed no-lag landing area would put them all on the same footing.

Even if you could avoid that you'd still penalize popular places: lots of avies means lots to download and generally a lot of lag as opposed to a deserted place noone has any interest in visiting other than the "rezzing performance" search bot.

If the sim happens to have a stuck pending download when the bot visited it would drop all the way to the bottom because no textures would ever rez while it's stuck.

Are you going to count the surroundings as well? If you do then you penalize themed builds; if you don't then someone can simply parcel off the store so that the building and decorations are all located on a different parcel (and owned by a different avie).

Web analogies just don't work for SL search.

Especially since people still use bots to artificially increase their numbers, in a clear violation of LL rules.

For example, there is an xmass store in my region. They routinely nearly fill the region with bots to push their traffic past 40k. Of course, the highest percentage of traffic from human beings there are noobs who thing that high traffic=good and neighbors ARing it.

May traffic die the painful death it deserves.

I dunno. To me, even for social places, the speed of rezzing is a thousand times more important than the number of avatar minutes folks have spent there in the past 24 hours. If it's a themed build that will take a long time to rez, it had better be one I came explicitly to see, regardless of search ranking. And if stuck downloads started hurting the big revenue stores, you can bet stuck downloads would get fixed, tout de suite.

If it penalizes the big-box stores--the ones selling everything, like a latter-day Dwellget--we should be worried why? Those places are already reaping tremendous benefit from spurious matches against every damn item rezzed there, as well as the "mall effect" on traffic, so rezzing speed would just be a proxy for specificity of match, really: a good thing, IMHO.

Of course, I'm idiosyncratic, in that rez time is currently my #1 bugaboo about SL in general. That Search can't rank based on idiosyncratic criteria is another serious limitation--until LL's homogenization and ethnic cleansing initiatives drive all the pioneer-spirited from the grid.

Honestly, neither of those would be beneficial to full sim owners that put alot of time and effort into a sim. Who cares if it takes a few extra minutes to fully rez, I'd take something detailed over the quickest rezzing.

As well, our location is an entertainment based business (we run the Digital Championship Wrestling Federation) and the businesses that consider sponsorship want to see good traffic coming in to know they're getting decent exposure. We let them know we had a huge show coming up and ended up showing up with less traffic than we got from yesterday while only a few people were on the sim.

Also, I hate traffic botting, we don't use them, and I only judge my traffic count on what I see from people coming in. I was on almost all day on the 19th, so I saw exactly how packed we were. Either way, traffic does no good to those that don't want to use bots or have people "park" their avi's, and fastest rezzing just means you'll get the bland, shitty locations first.

No, actually, I'd get the locations first that are created by people who know how to optimize builds, instead of people who know how to game Traffic and optimize IBLs. It's academic anyway: there's zero chance Google will make pageload part of GSA, and even if they did, zero chance LL would feed it image download times--especially given the current state of the grid. I'm not really serious anyway: it would *kill* all ground-level Mainland parcels because there's no way to "optimize out" the neighbors' wildly disparate textures and sculptmaps--which is the only reason I'm sometimes tempted by Estate ownership.

I get it that you're not gaming Traffic, and that's a really good thing. But that means you in fact would fare better if Traffic were removed from the Search rankings, at least until such time as LL made a serious attempt to get rid of all the Traffic gaming that persists these many months since they announced that it was a violation. Not only that, but your sponsors who want to see your Traffic scores would do better, too: they'd be getting a fair shot at your real sim visitors--the real Traffic that your events generate--not competing with all the phony Traffic numbers. Your numbers mean something--something a great deal more valuable than Search ranking, even if that ranking weren't so widely scammed by others.