Bye Bye Traffic Bots/Camping

Come on Yumi, you can do better then that!
For heavens sake, you take 1 line out of a posting full of good arguments, ignore the rest? Rene is as far as I know a great content creator with some valid arguments here, so if you are going to react to that posting, the least you could do is consider those as well.

It is important to remember a few things here:

1. Phil wants traffic to go away. He doesn't want to have to use bots. More on this later.

2. We cannot conflate results with presentation. Yes, both are part of the implementation but one should not be thrown out because of the other. We need to make it clear what is more useful. Honestly, I have no idea who the hell comes up with the UI changes and who the hell they consult with. Phil is focused on the results, but many people are more angry with the UI. Keeping those things separate will keep the discussion more focused.

3. Phil wants to see relevant results in search, as do most if not all of us. We all SHOULD know that any search tool is not going to be perfect and that NO search tool will be a true indicator of quality. Quality is also a subjective matter. Bigger, more popular store with lots of picks doesn't always translate into quality. Search is not going to remove the task of actual shopping if that is what you use it for.

4. Search is not just for shopping. It also has to locate non-profit and educational things for exploring. It is not going to be perfect. But as has been explained before in other threads, the system expects the listings to be accurate and honest and puts priorities on certain things (prominence, etc.). Phil has given people the tools to largely equalize the playing field but if they don't use it, that is not his fault. If he was the singularly greedy bastard that some people make him out to be, we would never have known as much about how it works and search would be an even bigger mess than it is right now. A lot more of us would be even more frustrated because we wouldn't know how to get better rankings.

5. Phil has used bots to his advantage because he treats his business like a business, not a hobby or a game. Search all is not just a directory but a limited marketing tool that, if others would play along correctly, would make the differences between similar places marginal. It is not cheating. But because people don't want to play along, you have vast differences in results. Phil makes the equivalent of a rl living off his SL business, and it is foolish from that perspective to not employ every angle he can. Right now he has a large competitive advantage mostly because of people's resistance to change.

No one put words in your mouth then yourself Sling. The only issue may be the way words are understood. I use the available tools as I see fit. You call that abuse, hence dishonest. But the thing is, that YOU find it abuse. That is not a fact, but an opinion. Others in this thread think different, but they are not calling you names.

Bottomline: I respect everyones opinion. But as soon as they fall back to calling names, I loose that respect. You have every right to believe what you do, but so do I. What makes you and me different, is that I still see you as a right-thinking person

I'm not sure that I will ever have the skill with language to describe a practice as being dishonest while at the same time not giving the impression to those practising dishonesty that I am describing their practice as dishonest.

Your definition of "name-calling" is broken I think.

And I would say the fact that happened to him is a flaw in the system which should be corrected in itself.



Or they think it would be better to change how marketing in SL does work. So that, y'know, people actually have an incentive to work on creating more than they do on marketing.

To be reasonably successful in business within SL 1) you need to produce "Quality" items that are sought after 2) you need to be good at marketing internally, externally and locally......and if you have a very large business....3) you need to have financial acumen (business models & Business plans). I know plenty of creators that produce excellent & unique products but haven't a clue how to translate that into direct sales!

It isn't necessarily dishonest, though it is opportunistic. Taking advantage of an opportunity doesn't make one evil.

Until you actually find out what he found out, you can't be sure about that.

Even then, ability to "research" will be divided between people. I already mentioned people who have GSAs in their offices, or people who have friends working for Google. Phil, for example, in his "comprehensive guide.." post, talks about the default settings and weightings on a GSA - which means he's worked with one in a hosting capacity. That's a very unique advantage, which is a whole different ball game from simply having done more experiments than someone else with the SL search engine.

Cry me a river!

So Phil has experience working with or for Google.....then SL is really an ideal platform for him to maximise that knowledge gained through RL work in order to be a successful in SL. Oh wow....that really isn't fair! <rolls eyes>

Yet, so far, we've had two people say that critical to their success was the fact that they were a) a SEO specialist and ...

Read this part well people. It indeed were the Lindens who told us how to optimize for search. So it is kind of running behind the facts to say we should not.

That's still very relative though.

You put a new item out at your store and send out an update and someone shows up and notices that instead of L$1k you put it up for sale at L$1.

That person can:
* not buy it and let you know, allowing you to adjust the price and buy it then
* buy it, IM you and pretend they only noticed the price difference on purchase
* buy it and leave
* buy it and start tp'ing all their friends
* buy it and spam every group they're in telling people to come pick up the "freebie"
* buy 500 copies and resell them for L$500/piece when you realize your error

Where do you draw the line? It's all "opportunistic", just to various degrees. If you can even draw a line at all since anyone can always argue you should have simply paid more attention and not made the mistake in the first place, and because none of the actions even "hurt" you in any way.

I agree with the intention here, but the Lindens only gave us *some* information about how to optimize. In fact, if those were the only ways to optimize, then everything would be just fine. But there remain two problems:

First, there are totally artificial things that we know affect ranking of search results. (I mean, Picks as IBLs? Come on!)

And second, they've *not* disclosed everything, and in fact there are still things affecting that ranking that none of us--not even Phil--knows. In other threads we're still speculating on how many IBLs can dance on the head of a pin. This is just dumb. It's like "security through obscurity" applied to how the search mechanism works. If there's some deep dark secret about how they're ranking stuff, it's not a secret that protects the rankings from manipulation, it's just a noise-injector until somebody actually wastes the time to figure out what's going on, at which point it becomes a "trade secret" until it becomes common knowledge. If that's the "game" here, it's a really stupid and tedious one.

I guess I'm saying that the problem is "beyond good and evil": it is about what's productive and what's not. Optimization isn't evil, but a poorly crafted and incompletely described set of optimization targets is not productive.

Nothing is dishonest or evil unless it's against the letter of the TOS/CS.

The little boy who shouted "The King has no clothes" was merely expressing an opinion.
Others in the precession had another opinion.

Up to now I have just worked hard, practiced, focused creating better and better things thinking eventually there would be reward at end to all the hard work and effort in making unique, well made content that I could be proud of.
But after talking to few people I know who are somewhat successful who didn't spend all the endless hours I have in learning, perfecting my skills and observing things perhaps all the endless hours of effort I have spent were in vain. I should just resold things I found like freebies or other people's content and spent more time on getting the customers and not bother if money was the most important thing.
The thing is it wasn't the most important thing to me not because I am wealthy because I wanted to do right thing.
Sadly people who do right thing don't always get a head. So is the right things to do always right?
People who get head figure out how to use the system to their advantage regardless of what effort they put in making their product or services.
Quality really may not matter in long run.

High paid classified are honest. It's clear to all that the exposure ranking is paid for.
.

Ohhh thats not so.

Dishonesty and evil having nothing to do with the TOS/CS

Its just not an infraction if its not against the TOS/CS

Kind of like laws in real life. Its not the law that determines whether something is dishonest, immoral, evil, etc.

And second, they've *not* disclosed everything, and in fact there are still things affecting that ranking that none of us--not even Phil--knows.

Absolute poppycock!!!....i have seen advertisers that spend 300-400k for an advert and list just about every common keyword imaginable and go straight to the top when searching keywords in Classified. That to me is more annoying and dishonest than the use of either camping bots or Picks camping. Top positions for the most common keywords in my sector are held by businesses that don't even create said product....because they have a 400k advert!

Another example was a known Skin company that had a reputation for stealing other designs (texture ripping) was able to appear at the top or near the top of Classifieds using the keyword "Skins". I actually visited that shop and stood there for over 10 mins....people were landing there virtually every 10 secs! That imo was also dishonest....not only for selling ripped skins, but taking away traffic away from genuine creators.

I'd love to know how you can possibly claim to know this, in a purely virtual world..

I agree FD...you and i have talked about this alot...you are extremely talented, but if you dont't get the biz side of things set up and marketed correctly your things won't sell. It does NOT mean you don't have quality stuff and talent...it just means no one knows that.