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You mean... you actually want your bulk advertising scheme to advertise!
How dastardly devious!

Yes it will - but that wasn't mentioned.

Nope. You made a statement and i asked you some questions about it - because I didn't think you knew the answers - and I was right. The "supplementary information" wasn't supplementary to anything - just confusing if anyone actually wanted to know about improving an avatar's ranking, because it didn't contain any such information.

Yes you did answer it, and I said that that information won't help an avatar's ranking to get any higher. Your post seemed to indicate that it would.

I'm not posting to provide information. I told you before, if you post incorrect information, you can expect to be corrected. That's what I'm doing.

Yes it did. I even suggested that you try it. I also pointed out, to those who thought you had an ulterior motive, that an avatar's ranking is irrelevant - nobody wants to improve it.

And as I mentioned, group founding is not one of the things that one would expect a bot/model/tester/whatever to be doing - unless it's Alt Abuse to game search.

Group membership could be used as some sort of indicator of worth/activity level of an account. There are links from and to between avatars and groups. Whether or not it's meaningful is another matter, but the links could be used. In any case, groups are gamed as many places for both camping and Picks buying insist on group membership.

Is that a promise?
You'll do it without fail?
No cheating?

And you won't imply that something is incorrect when it actually is?

Now, now.
Up above you admit that "the power of an avatar's pick links ..... helps the destination pages to rank higher."


Picks do help, and a pick from a high-ranked avatar would help a little more.

That's right, but we're talking about ranking an avatar higher - not about ranking destination pages higher, and the destination pages can't be avatar pages. If you really want to create links to an avatar page, have it create a group (it's linked to from the group page) and/or have it create lots of Events (it's linked to from each event page, but that would need to be an ongoing task).

Btw, I don't "admit" it. I flat out posted almost as soon as the All was launched.

You did. Not in the first post, but you did in the second one.

Group membership could be used in the way you suggest, but they aren't used in that way. In fact, they aren't used at all. There aren't links from and to avatars and groups. There is one link to the group creator from the group page, and that's all. If groups are gamed, it's not for the rankings, because they don't affect them, except as I've mentioned. Memberships don't affect the rankings.

Yes, but with the greatest respect (as they say) you tend to give out confusing messages
e..g. "Yes it did. I even suggested that you try it. I also pointed out, to those who thought you had an ulterior motive, that an avatar's ranking is irrelevant - nobody wants to improve it."

I think that an entity.X would want to have high-ranked avatars not only link to their pages but also have the pages of high-ranked avatars include keywords that apply as closely as possible as search terms appropriate for Entity.X
Elan says the same above, in that he sees the value of profiles that come up for search term that apply to his business.
He's chosen the keywords that he feels are the best for him. If someone does an All search and leaves the default of Any Category, those profiles will pop up, as will Groups, Wiki pages etc. The higher the ranking of any of those pages that say 'Ninja', the better.
The ranking of anything that refers to him is important to him. Every little bit helps.
The text of Picks in a Profile would be more helpful in the search listings as the leading picks is what the listing shows, but the Description text is good if the searcher checks a high-ranked Profile.
It's also useful to Elan if the Profiles of people referring to him have higher ranking than the ranking of his competitors and anyone referring to his competitors.


It is quite misleading to say that "an avatar's ranking is irrelevant - nobody wants to improve it."
Certainly, if someone had a bunch of alts being used to game ranking, then the ranking of those alts would be worth working on.



Or you ridicule keyword stuffing and then you keyword stuff on you own page.


This sort of thing is bound to confuse people.

That was a reply to Elan saying that something didn't occur to anyone but, to be honest, I made a mistake with that reply. I hadn't noticed him talking about avatars coming up in search. I was thinking that the purpose was the mobile ads that the avatars are.

I've never heard of anyone wanting an avatar to rank highly but I suppose some do.

I don't believe that I've ridiculed keyword stuffing. I dislike it enormously, but it's fast becoming the norm at the top. My dealings with it may be confusing, but they do make sense.

A month ago, I had a nice html page that contained a selection of each of the types of things I sell - seating, beds, outdoor furniture, etc. Until not long before that it was ranked somewhere in the middle of page #1 for "furniture", but it suddenly dropped to the bottom half of page #2. That searchterm is one that I've never bothered with and I wasn't aware of the drop until someone told me.

So a month ago I decided to do something about it and I looked at the pages that were ranking at the top. Bit by bit I changed my page to move up a bit. The changes gradually reduced the number of items listed for sale, and added some keyword stuffing, until eventually I completely abandoned having any items for sale in the page - one of each type isn't exactly interesting or useful to users. All the way through I managed to keep some useful information in top half of the page, and I got to #2 and was content with that. I wasn't content with the page though. I disliked the way it had gone. Just a few days ago, a competitor also abandoned having items for sale listed in their page.

Yesterday and today, two competitors jumped over me. I know what to do, but I've sat here and wondered whether or not to leave them to it. One of them has a 100% keyword stuffed page. He doesn't really know what he's doing, but his adjustments sometimes make gains for him and sometimes they don't. I can see in advance whether his adjustments will work or not. There are five people actively competing. By "actively", I mean jockeying for position by making changes - not every day and necessarily ever few days, but active just the same, and the changes are always in the direction of more keyword stuffing. They have to be.

I dislike it going that way, as you probably remember from another recent thread, but I chose to go with it, hanging on to as much useful information for users as I could with each change. To deal with one or both of those who jumped over me, I would need to reduce the useful part in favour of more keyword stuffing, and I'm undecided whether to keep going that way or not. It's becoming utterly ridiculous.

That's why it makes sense. It may be confusing when it's not all known, but it does make sense.

Sling: Try "dog dog dog dog"
Phil: Ignore Sling. She doesn't know anything. Not that simple, yadda,yadda

Now that I read it again, I see your proint.
You were not ridiculing keyword stuffing, you were attempting to ridicule me.
Clearly you now consider the likes of dog dog dog to be significant in ranking.
You were gaming the Forums.



This sort of thing is why your suggestion to the LL Search team of a hidden page for indexing was not a wonderful one.
Ranking that is gamed by things like keyword stuffing is not at all helpful to searchers.
As is clear from what you post above, even you needed to be able to see what others were doing, because they knew more about search ranking than you did.
You then have choices, with two extremes. Just do what they do, or campaign to have such games outlawed or made impossible.

You've made yourself fair game, Sling. But you still didn't understand it because I didn't provide any information, and what you said wasn't correct. There is more to that just your "dog dog dog".

Of course it wasn't a wonderful idea - it would be a convoluted way of dealing with it, but it would a *lot* better for users than what exists now. Bots and picks camping are a *lot* better for users than what the All search is rapidly becoming. It's not that wrong places are being ranked - it's the deterioration in the usefulness of the html pages that's fast going out the window.

It depends what you mean. The html pages are a lot less helpful but right places are still ranking at the top, and that's helpful.

They were certainly quicker than me to realise the effect of keyword stuffing. I've never claimed to know everything about it. I don't think anyone does. The ones who are actively jockeying for position don't seem to - the 100% one in particular. I can see that by the changes they make (I have all their current and past pages for the last month).

I don't need to campaign. I've told LL about it and I've suggested a decent solution. They can do with it what they want. That's the sum total of my campaign.

My alt is #1 for the phrase. But I'm confused. Elan - did you run the payments yet? Someone gave my alt 83L out of the blue. I didn't intend to leave it there until the payment.

ETA:
My mistake. The alt is #1 for the whole phrase, but not the half phrase that was stated in the first post.

Due to the normal sort of problems I half expected the payments didn't run properly at midnight this morning so I ran it manually at about 3am. I guess your alt is Wicked Leigh.

Soon I'm going to make a history page that shows final rankings and payments for previous weeks.

I think this week the payments were as follows:
XUXU Khandr 4 L$96
Segnbora Lionheart 5 L$95
Nathaniel Sweetwater 6 L$94
Firefly Wirefly 7 L$93
Markus33 Munro 8 L$92
Fancy Pixelmaid 9 L$91
Secret Trapdoor 10 L$90
Lups Lupindo 11 L$89
Mad Scientist 12 L$88
Binat Owatatsumi 13 L$87
Sylver Dyrssen 14 L$86
dark Frostwych 15 L$85
RareMomentOf Clarity 16 L$84
Wicked Leigh 17 L$83
jane Eyre 18 L$82
Wayne Mopp 20 L$80
Xbaquiyalo Etchegaray 21 L$79
Amee Judd 22 L$78
Tan Qian 23 L$77
Bhramara Bellios 24 L$76
Areola Aya 25 L$75

Remember the rankings are calculated from this search:

But the official current rankings are published here http://ninjaland.net/tools/search-scumming/

Yep. Wicked is my alt. I didn't intend it to receive any money - it was just an experiment. It's #1 for the whole phrase, but I never really noticed that the last part is left off when you do the search.

The highest paid received about 36 cents US.

My profile says who I am. I haven't put a great deal of effort into it, so it's not great, but putting some store or some land dealer in there for the sake of earning 36 cents (or for the sake of getting someone else to put my store in their picks) seems counter-productive. It pollutes my self-portrait with stuff that is, at best, meaningless. At worst it says I'm for sale, cheap, and that I have low standards. And it's dishonest. It tells people that I value something that I don't. And it may waste their time or money if it gets them to investigate something that may not be up to my standards.

Too many schemes like this make SL smell of hucksterism. Of course there is far worse in SL than picks gaming and using the forums for self-promotion.

Your problem is that you try to game discussions. That might might make it look like you dominate in individual exchanges because of the sheer force of bluster and repeated assertion of your superior knowledge.
That gets you into trouble in the long run as the contradictions and misdirections come to light. If you played it straight, you wouldn't be getting into difficulties.



You instinct was to suggest the the page to be ranked would be hidden. That would give a ranking advantage to people who knew something about gaming. Then you realised that others who were better than you would beat you at gaming without you being able to know why.



Right places will rank at the top even if no gaming goes on. As I said in what you are responding to there - "Ranking that is gamed by things like keyword stuffing is not at all helpful to searchers. "





I don't think that anyone could validly claim to know everything about it.
You however claim to more than me about it. This is clearly not the case.
What you do is seize on your own interpretation of something I mention. You then use that to cast doubt on everything.
The dog dog dog thing is a case in point.

You L your A off at me talking about "classic" techniques.
Then we discover you using one of the classic techniques that I had mentioned.
The reason they are termed "classic" is that they are ........ eh..... classic.

It would be a very poor search gamer that didn't try all of those and who didn't go back to conduct regular regression tests when LL specifically blogged that they would be working on search over the coming months.

The truth is that I and others know at least as much as you do about search engines. Some of us know more about some particular aspects. Between us we know a lot, but the knowledge is spread. Nobody knows it all, particularly in a changing world.
You're no help as you don't want to give. You also confuse things for others.
You pressed LL to stop traffic bots, but not because you saw anything wrong with traffic-botting. You just found it inconvenient to go to the necessary lengths to compete with the leaders. Your game was to prevent them from doing something that you considered to be perfectly legitimate.
You're a gamer. You try to game everything- including forum discussions.

That's fair Anya. So, do you think there's no value in succesful businesses funneling money through newbies? I suppose it's this actual scheme you dislike more than the underlying dream.

Let's say I had the overall goal of paying large numbers of newbies small amounts of money in exchange for some service they could provide. Do you have any other suggestions?

Edit: Wait, also, it's not me keeping this thread alive with an endless, pointless, personal argument about total nonsense.

It's the "smell" that motivates me to bang on about things like search-gaming.
The blatantly noticeable one like botting, camping and pick buying are particularly toxic.
The less obvious ones are discouraging to people who play straight.


There are fundamental challenges for the technology supporting SL, but when in-your-face nonsense is seen to be clearly rewarded, this is a big problem for society.


I'm certainly easier about Elan's advertising experiment than I would be about picks-buying - which has a more powerful effect.


An interesting thing about this thread is that it has clearly outed Alt Abuse for the purpose of search gaming.

It's not picks gaming, Anya. Did you read the first post?

Last pick in the alt's page repeats the whole phrase.

That's doesn't appear to be what you're doing. You seem to be paying alts of forum readers to game search.

If I search for land or land dealers, I want their search rankings to be based on their worthiness in the land market. If they get my attention based on anything else (social success, knowledge of how search works, cheating, etc) then my time has been wasted.

If search returns something other than relevant results, SL as a whole suffers. It causes people to not use search, or to not shop, or to not find social things to do. It causes people to quit, thinking SL is one big empty, tacky mall. I know I spend very little and I explore very little, mostly because it's such a damned chore to find anything.

If you want to help newbies by giving them small amounts of money, then just do so. Your payback is goodwill and a reputation as a generous person, which people will illogically extend to thinking you're honest, kind and trustworthy, too. Consider the reputation that Sarah Nerd built by paying more for parcels than they were worth. That reputation lasted far longer than the WSE money that made it possible.

He's paying people to put advertising in their profile. Same thing as picks gaming. He's paying for better search results rather than offering something worth searching for.

Buying ads is what most biz does, I think it's pretty normal.