Almost Free Money - Anyone Can Participate

Let's call it a game. Here's how it works.

You change your profile so the first line reads exactly as follows:

Rent Land from NinjaLand - ninjaland.net

Make sure you get the spacing and capitalization exactly right. Use cut and paste if it helps.

Once a week on Saturday at midnight SL time I will perform a search in All for "Rent Land from NinjaLand" (with quotes). I will only be searching for profiles, not parcels or wiki pages or anything else.

If you are first in the search you will get paid L$100. If you are second you will get L$99. If you are third it's L$98 and so on down to zero. In other words if you can get into the top 100 you will get free money.

You will only get paid if your profile contains exactly the right line and it is the first thing in the description box. If you rank in the search but your profile is wrong you will get skipped.

Now, a couple of notes:
o Firstly, a lot of my alts and colleagues appear in that search. I'm not interested in using my alts to beat you but they're there anyway and you do have to get in the top 200 regardless to get paid.
o You can check the current rankings by going here: At some point in the near future I will publish an easier to see ranking web page.
o To play the game your profile must have a web page. This only happens if you have logged in recently AND you are premium or have created a group that is still active. You can create a group now for L$100 and your profile will have a web page within the next day or two.
o Don't forget changes to your profile may take upto 24 hours to fully take effect.
o There are ways to increase your rank, but really, even I'm not sure what they are. Good luck.
o I don't think I have to spell out here that the point of this is that you are advertising my store in your profile and I'm paying you for it. You're not required to do any other actual work for NinjaLand or respond to queries about it if you don't want to.
o This offer is guaranteed to run for the next 4 weeks after which I will reassess it's effectiveness.

It's nothing to do with me but I want to mention that the (with quotes) bit doesn't mean that the line must be in quotes in the profile. The quotes are only used when searching - they make sure that only pages that contain the full phrase will be returned.

No offense meant and I know you're one of the good guys, but doesn't this belong in another forum?

Also nothing to do with me , but I'd add that you probably need to ensure you have no Adult content words in the rest of your profile because they will stop you appearing on the web search page which only shows profiles with no adult content.

Yeah but I thought I'd serve my search scamming with a side of forum abuse.

Fascinating.

More valuable than the ad, is the data mining to figure out what, exactly, lands someone higher up in search than the next person.

Friends? Picks? Age? Amount of content?

I'd be really interested to know that, but the wisest course would be not to tell *anybody*. Information = cash.

Half of the people won't even notice or listen, and catch it. The other Half will argue with your methods and motives and discount any helpful information you gave them. Guaranteed.

Maybe two people will catch it....and you made a new friend.

There are ways of doing it that are probably only known or realised by a few people. If "information = cash" how much will you pay me to tell you the ways?

One of the ways that engines credit pages with value is in the amount of content.
Having hyperlinks scattered throughout also helps.
They are trying to estimate the possibility of the page being interesting.

Run that by the Ninja rankings


Think of it in human terms.
You see someone, you check their profile.
Name and DOB only - boring! No value
A bunch of text and a lot of picks - other tabs filled out. Potentially interesting.

I would guess that the Ninja alts don't have a huge network of friends, so that sort of peer authoritativeness wouldn't apply if it were to be used.
They might have other sources of links, like in Wiki.



Add:

And Phil's post above whil I was typing reminded me of Age. There is a theory that if something has survived for a long time it *might* have some worth

I want to point out that Sling doesn't know how the All search works so such details as posted above this are well worth ignoring.

I admire your tenacity but...
Is'nt this just another way of gaming the search system?

I don't get it.

'sides if it sounds too good to be true there has to be a catch. Or something like that.

He's trying to get other people to work out the method of getting to the top in Search, then he can examine their keywords.

This is the problem with having Search favor people with secret information.

Oh. Thanks.

Secret information?

Six months equivalent income on whatever the information would bring in, were I to use it, would probably be quite worth the eventual price. Say it would bring in $L 100 a year, I'd pay 50!

Or $L 100 million, sure, it would be worth $L 50 million to know.

The question isn't how much to pay, it's how valuable the information actually is, and if it's possible to sort that out ahead of time.

Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to get an av's page up the rankings isn't worth much at all. Nobody cares if one av ranks above another av. The only value is a small increase in the power of the links that go from the av's page to other pages. Read about PageRank for more information on that. The GSA employs a PageRank-like system.

How about truth in advertising If you dont use the product why should you advertise it and for me i will only advertise what i know and use

There's a guy making something like 100's of thousands of USD a year because he's good at playing StarCraft.

His big scoop? He's really, really good at using those terran shuttles (essentially a real easy to shoot down troop transport) in his games. He plays tournaments.

Me, I woulda figured a skill like that to be utterly worthless once.

I'm sad this conversation has gone the way it has. It honestly never occurred to me to use this as some sort of clever information gathering technique. You'll note that for all keywords relevant to my business I'm already top of search or close enough. The game doesn't require people to tell me how they got to the top and frankly I already know how it would be done so there's no need for any of that nonsense.

This is about two things. Firstly, gaming the search. i.e. paying people to help my store appear prominently in search. Secondly, paying newbies for the kinds of service they can provide as a replacement for camping which is now illegal. Oh, and thirdly if it ever gets big enough it's about getting advertising for my store on thousands of active newbie profiles.

Still working every angle possible, even lowering yourself to take advantage of unmoderated forums. Is it really worth it to gain the one or two people from here who will participate?

I'm not mad, son. Just disappointed.

/faints

For what it's worth I believe you completely. I've gotten all manner of accusations myself about why I started my gateway, and while yeah it's kind of a cool thing the losses outweigh the benefits.

Just saying that for everyone else, the info would be worth a lot more than the ad if they knew how to use it.

For those that do take you up on it, I'm pretty sure that they will see the $L 50 or $L 20 or whatever they get as a wonderful windfall. I've occasionally talked to a new resident, given them $L 25 just for whatever reason, and watched them really get into the whole world because of it.

I don't know what is wrong with paying people to participate in market research. I have a discount card for the local grocery. When I use the card, I get discounts on groceries. The card exists to get marketing information on me. But to save five or ten dollars a week- well, at that price, I'll sell the information on my spending habits.

I was wondering something else about the ethics of paying people to list a product in their profile. How many people are doing letter-writing campaigns to corporations that pay for celebrity endorsements in advertising?

Give it a rest.

What I posted were classic factors used by search engines in page ranking.
You know it. I know it. Anyone with a clue knows it.
If people are intrigued by how things work, they can experiment rather than waiting for gawdalmighty to toss them a few crumbs that he might or might not have.

If you are telling people that these factors are not used in the GSA, then you are telling them that it ranks solely using other factors.

That's crap. You're back to your tired old games.




Put up or shut up.

Hey, stop fighting in my shameless self promotion thread.

Meanwhile current rankings and some info can be found here: http://ninjaland.net/tools/search-scumming/