Is Paying for Links in Profile Picks Cheating?

feel free to give me some money to put you in my picks .. pay up front though.. haha

Not that way, no. I think I'd rather be homeless. I hadn't thought about people using a ton of alts to milk as much pick money as possible. SL has become a kind of lameness of humanity simulator. Welcome to greedville.

well paid picks is like camping in intent -but its true that it doesn't use up sim resources like camping.

In much the same way that ...

Selling multiple alts' picks would be like campbots.

Using multiple alts' picks would be like trafficbots.

I agree to an extent. But 50 profile picks doesnt really get you anywhere in the over saturated catagories in search. You need many hundreds of picks for it to really help get you to the top. So using multiple picks on multple alts to enhance your own business doesnt have that big an impact imho.

QFT

Its so bad these days that some of Greedsville's prominent citizens proudly proclaim their modus operandi.

WOW are people that greedy? Im afraid I have to much self respect to ever be involved in that. If I need 10kL$ every 2 weeks I would simply buy them.

I personally wouldnt do it either. But I am glad there are those that do.

However it is already getting a bit out of hand. I have stats for everyone on my network who sells picks. I know what the top paying businesses are and how much they pay. I am already being priced out of the market. As it becomes more well known some people are paying out lots for a single pick. it's going the same way as the classifieds. Soon people will be paying hundreds of USD every weeks to game search via picks.

so how come I get up real high in searches with my store? I doubt many if any people have me in their picks.. maybe its the 2-3 votes a week I get from my antique voting station haha

Sounds like there are some people who will end up losing money having paid out too much buying Picks spots off people.

There has to be a tipping point where the gaming is not longer profitable.

Yes agreed but business is not fair I spend a lot of money and time monitoring all sorts to ensure our RL business sites stay as near the top of google as possible and its forgotten here that LL wants SL as the next 3D internet and eventually big business is going to come in and start to shape SL, as they want people to buy their RL products, its been tried and they will come again im sure and SL will change as Ive said yet again.

Since bring our RL business to SL we have seen a growth rate on our 2 sites and we have now invested in an island to help promote ourselves, hopefully in a way that will add to peoples experience within SL and i see expansion in the coming months. I don't ever envisage making a profit here from what we do as we run a free profile site and not everyone here will sign up for it, but i hope that will enjoy what we offer here. We also enjoy SL and have made many good friends over the years here and that is also important but my businesses are important to me as thats what pays the bills for me

However i will always conduct my business here in an ethical manner and always within the rules and using the tools that LL gives me for that.

Of course it's cheating.

Let's say that I'm looking for low-prim furniture.
The search results should be ranked by relevancy to my search term.
The number of accounts that have a given parcel in their picks is currently part of the ranking algorithm.
Why would this be? Why should pick counts affect ranking?
The theory must be that if avatars put a parcel in their picks then it's a vote of confidence/appreciation of the parcel content.
However, if the picks exist only because the parcel owner is paying for them then that basis of using picks is invalid. It is no different to using traffic bots or camping to manipulate ranking.

do you have proof that picks actually matter in searches?

If Google catches wind of you buying links to improve your search rank, you get penalized
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

just shop at Phils!!!








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* Unless he banned you like he did Moxzi

We buy advertising in the Link referral search engine which is well indexed by Google and it certainly helps us and google have never said anything to us as we also run their tools on our site, we have a profile site with currently just over 4300 members and growing daily we also run a web shop with in excess of 3500 items google indexes all the pages, i imagine the profile site being indexed because every page is an individuals profile page, dont know if that counts towards PR tho

As soon as I think Low prim furniture i think of Phil

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/03/26/tips-to-improve-your-search-ranking/
"Picks Matter - Having links in other Resident’s Picks tab counts, but creating bots/zombies stuffed with top picks doesn’t help. The more active Residents Picks that reference your parcel/profile the more relevant your listings will be in the overall search."

Which is why merchants now pay for picks, and why some people have 40-50 "live" residents. :/

Whether it is "cheating" depends on the rules and mores of the community, so in that sense, it doesn't violate the TOS, so technically it's not "cheating." But it does lead down another path, similar to camping bots and traffic zombies... gamers will quickly figure out all they need to do to make money is to keep creating alts, and sign up each alt for Picks to earn money. Unseemly? Perhaps. That's where community mores come into play, and it remains to be seen how that will play out with all this.

And Google won't. If the links are presented as advertising, then Google has no problem wiht that. If the links are presented as part of your content, however, Google will remove PageRank from the offending site. They will not email you or warn you in any way (AFAIK) - they simply remove the rank.

Thanks for that I had a sudden rush of browsing then lol

OK i dont know anything about being paid for picks.. but i thought only premium members counted.

I am probably wrong but i was talking with a friend today about this and how it could be tacid acceptance from LL to do away with the traffic/dwell and move towards the new search which takes picks into account.

non paying members who didnt have any other income besides camping would either fizzle out or take a premium account in order to get all the lolly from ppl like Porky.

And yes if ppl start gaming Picks big time, it might become very profitable just to sell one`s Picks.

however it might be that i have no idea what i am talking about

Since having no alts up for about 30 hours, my traffic went down to 13167. Sales seem normal .. if not a little brisker because i put out some new products..

and we are still on page one of ALL for 3 different major keywords...
why i have no idea.. but i am terribly happy about it ^^

Dunno. There are other factors that determine your search listing too. Personally I am paying for very popular keywords so it dont come cheap. I already had quite allot of picks before I started as i have a good customer base, but i was still 20 - 30 pages into the listing before I started paying.



For me i have personally seen the results. Week on week I pay out more on picks and week on week my listing improved. It then reached a point where it didnt improve...i was sat about #7 on my main keywords for about a month, and then I started to see a decline as poeple are increasing the amount they pay for each pick. Every AV only has space for 10 picks so businesses are getting into a bidding war. Im personally not interested in that so I dont see it being of that much benefit to me come the end of the year. in the last 4 weeks i've slipped to position #12. So although I am still buying more picks on a weekly basis I am not increasing the amount I pay for each pick. Others are.

It's really sad.
For the non-tech, pick buying is a lot easier to organise than is running bots.
That probably explains why the practice is booming and why the price competition is increasing.
It's another abuse that does not scale.

In my opinion, people who sell their picks are no better than the unthinking people who buy spamvertised products. They ensure that the abuse will continue.


However, there is another factor that is far more serious than search gaming here.

It used to be that a persons picks said something about them. Whether the picks referred to themselves, friends, enemies or favourite stores the picks as part of the overall profile gave a flavour of the person. Profile browsing was part of the fun and social mechanism in SL.
Greed is destroying that.

The sooner that LL remove picks from search weighting the better.

Agreed. Picks are great, but they shouldnt ever have been used as an influence in search.

And replaced with what? Keywords was your answer last time but how do you order them when the same keyword appears at multiple locations, search has to have order.