The Most Honest in my Field

I wonder what criteria you use for "winning an argument".
You argued in "these arguments" that there was nothing wrong / cheating / unethical in using traffic bots.
LL banned them and described them as unfair.
Most reasonable people would consider that your argument lost.

You're back to your classic fantasy that if you say something is so, then it is so. It makes you look stupid.




The idea that it takes a communication from you to make LL aware of keyword stuffing is laughable. You're making yourself look stupid.

I don't use any particular criteria. I just look to see who won and who lost, and you've always been the one who lost.

Regarding "wrong / cheating / unethical" and "unfair", the two are not the same. For instance, it's considered by some that it's unfair that some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths when others are born into dire poverty, and they may be right. But being born rich isn't "wrong / cheating / unethical". Some may consider it unfair that some people have the ability to use traffic bots while others don't know how to do it, or don't have the resources to do it. So you see, Sling, you're point is nonsense.

I'm disappointed in you. I would have thought that, since you chose to turn a perfectly good thread into your own stupid passtime, you would have improved since you used to argue these things, but I think you've actually deteriorated. I'm sure you used to be better at it, but I may be wrong.

Grow up, Sling. I didn't say, suggest, or even hint at any such thing. I said "it's about time too" and pointed out the reason how I know that they've definitely known about the problem for at least the best part of a year. Who did you say looks stupid?

First of all: Congrats Phil, you finally are back in a fight with Sling. The forums were so silent without it


Well I hate to burst your bubble, bot Phil lost no argument at all. Because all the time you were rambling about traffic bots being unethical, wrong, cheating, whatsoever, the counter argument was: As long as LL decides they are okay to use, they are. Nothing more, nothing less.
Then LL finally decided to ban them (stupid but true), and Phil took them down as promised. Because as soon as LL banned them, they because wrong. Against the T.O.S. ergo wrong. So where did Phil loose that argument?


Now you are speaking against your own words. Wasn't it true that if enough people made LL aware of something, they would act? Didn't that cause the end of addfarms for example? So why would Phil communicating with LL, as a former SEO specialist, lead to something? Because he knows what he is talking about?
Strange how your own logic suddenly stops being logical if it is about someone else then you.

Yeah, but why did she have to start in my mild humour thread? There have been perfectly good bots threads that she could got stuck into but didn't. Why did she have to kill a perfectly good light humour thread? Now I'm not gonna get any statues in glorification of me because she's killed it. I am not amused

That's got to be one of the most stupid assertions EVAH!

Alternatively, the logic is compelling.
In which case....
Without using any particular criteria, I just look and see that it was in fact *I* that won every argument.

Brilliant!!

You should go on TV quiz programs and insist that the answers you give are correct. You'll make a fortune!

Ah but what you're forgetting is that judging who won and who lost requires a functionning brain, which you give the appearance of not having. On the other hand, it's also useful to judge by the weight of expressed opinion. Either way, you've never won one of these arguments.

Of course, the more technical mind might go so far as to judge according to who sidesteps the others' points - y'know - like you do all the time, including right here in this thread - even with your last post! I like that way of judging.

There's quite a bit of difference between something being wrong and something not being allowed and one doesn't follow from the other in either direction.

Traffic bots were wrong right from the start but there were simply no consequences for using them up until the moment LL banned them. If they weren't wrong then there wouldn't have any reason to ban them in the first place.

Once there was actually a consequence for running them Phil ran off with his tail between his legs and moved on to the next "not yet disallowed" thing that he could exploit and so on and on.

Landlords evicting their tenants for no real reason is clearly wrong but they're perfectly in their right to do so. The fact that they face no consequences from LL does not make what they did right or justified in any way, nor can you twist things around and state that LL actively encourages people to behave in that fashion.

The problem with gaming search is that a lot of people tend to see it as a "victimless thing" but taken all together it does make search a whole lot less useful for each and every one of us.

With the addition of "Be advised that any attempt to artificially inflate your rank in search results could result in penalties to your rank, de-listing from search, and disciplinary action against your Second Life account." to the search policies it seems that LL might be finally catching on and hopefully it'll actually have some teeth behind it as well.

A "perfectly good" ..... ???
Noooooooooooo!


Some friend of yours observed that
1) Your place is ranked high for some search terms
2) You don't use any kind of Picks system
Your friend made no mention of honesty.

You chose to post this observation here for whatever reason.
You chose to post it under a heading "The Most Honest in my Field".
Apparently this choice of title - unrelated to your friend's observation - was "humour".

Perhaps this is mild humour under no particular criteria.

What a load of crap. You don't know the difference between undesirable (for whatever reason) and wrong? Wake up, Kitty.

What a load more crap. (a) there was no tail between anyone's legs here - I just complied with the ToS as I always did - and (b) what was the next thing I ran to? I want to know what it was because I want to know if it worked or not. But I'll save you the effort - there was no next thing.

I've disliked you for quite a long time, Kitty, but I haven't noticed you making things up before this thread. Look. Just because you were shown to be wrong a couple of times earlier in the thread, doesn't mean that you have to invent things in an attempt to get back at me. A stronger person would accept that s/he was wrong and just leave it. Or you could do what I do - admit when you're wrong. That's even better. Alright. I'm sorry that I said that you're not very good at this, but really you aren't.

Huh?

If this perfectly good, light humour thread wasn't to your taste, you ought to have skipped it - not kill it.

I don't think there is anything wrong about Phil being proud of his accomplishment in figuring out the search system and making it work for him.

My RL sweetie owns a RL company that uses the web. A lot of time, money, and research goes into optimizing how it shows up on search. This is just not an SL thing. It is a RL thing. It is not like Phil found some secret exploit he is keeping to himself and using. He has even tried to let SL know the flaws of the system.

I have enjoyed the discussion of ethics. It has been interesting.

Yes, Phil, you're thread was intended to be lightly humorous. It was a stretch, but I can go there. But do stop arguing with the wetbrains. Brilliant as your business mind may be, your constant rising to their bait makes you look...well, less than you assume yourself to be. Just a thought.

And no, I don't think there's anything wrong with what you're doing. I'd rather see the same keyword used than to find keywords I'm seeking and tp to the place to find naught but disappointment. Thanks for the honesty. Keep working on the humor.

Back to humor.

http://www.cowdepot.com/balinfield.jpg

Phil, I think you've jumped the shark.

ETA:



I moderated my response because I thought there was a chance you were using humor too advanced to be recognized by humans, but now I'm convinced you're just a sociopath.

http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html

You split your parcel and listed your store 6 times; and while the keyword repetition thing was there from the start it really wasn't nearly as bad as it is now (you missed counting the head-section occurances btw). And there was the whole cross-parcel linking before that.

Wrong about what? You do list your store in search 6 times and 3 of those listings do target "furniture" and the counts I mentioned are accurate.

"Be advised that any attempt to artificially inflate your rank in search results could result in penalties to your rank, de-listing from search, and disciplinary action against your Second Life account."

It might be selective reading on my part but "making the search system work for him" seems rather contrary to LL stating that they don't appreciate doing just that.

Actually he did for a while about a year to a year and a half or so back.

I don't believe Nimue Jewell does anything annoying or games the system and her low prim furniture is amazing. Beautiful designs and most have menus so you can change the textures.

Prim Pinchers: Nimue Isle 173, 155, 27

She is also offering some gorgeous freebies at her satellite location this weekend: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Nautilus%20-%20Dido/75/204/24

Check her stuff out. You won't be disappointed.

I have absolutely NO opinion about the ethics of what Phil does, because, frankly, I don't really understand the technical points.

I do, however, agree with what Kitty says here. There is a tendency for apologists for all sorts of behaviour in SL (and in RL too, really) to equate what is "permitted" with what is ethically "right." It's an argument that implies that LL is run by trained philosophers and ethicists, and that the ToS is therefore necessarily something along the lines of Plato's _Republic_, a coherent ethical model for human society.

Needless to say, the ToS is nothing of the sort: it's a set of rules set up, most often for legal reasons, by a company that is far more concerned with how well their app is working, and how to avoid getting into legal difficulties, than with questions of ethics.

Even were it true, however, that the ToS was an ethical rather than largely legal document, it would STILL not be sacrosanct. Before 2007, sexual age play was permitted in SL. Did this practice suddenly "become" ethically wrong because it is now prohibited in the KB? The same principle applies in RL. Slavery was legal in the US until the mid 19th century: the fact that it was legal did not make it ethical.

Bad laws and bad rules must be challenged: that's how society changes.

The "keyword repetition thing" that was there from the start wasn't keyword stuffing, as you wrongly think. It was what I put in items' descriptions. Nothing changed with those when the GSA came along, so you were barking up the wrong tree with that.

You said that I moved on to the next thing after traffic bots were banned, but you're wrong. The seperate parcels were there long before traffic bots were banned. You failed again. Oh, and the cross-linking was there before the ban too, but you knew that because the cross-linking was from parcel to parcel, as you know, so what was this new thing that you said I moved on to? You were wrong - there wasn't any new thing, and you were just being obnoxious for the sake of it.

Incidentally, cross-linking isn't wrong in way. But it wasn't cross-linking that endowed ranking power - it was linking from powerful pages that did it. Linking to pages for the purpose of improving rankings, is a standard, and highly reputable, seo method - or didn't you know?

Go back and read. I wrote where you were wrong, and I repeated one of them two paragraphs back.

And yet they told us to optimise our html pages before the GSA was launched. Since then, their own KB tells us to do the same thing. You are right (for a change) - it *is* selective reading on your part - and pointless you writing about it.

Yes I did. It was perfectly above board but it wasn't known by many people at the time, and you were wetting your knickers to post about it in this forum, which you eventually did. For those who don't know what the method was, it was including html in some items' data. The html could be used to link pages to other pages. There wasn't much point in doing it unless the linking page was powerful, but that's beyond the scope of this post It was particularly good for formatting pages with headings and color. For instance, I grouped product types on the page (beds, kitchen furniture, etc.) and I included a colored, bold heading for each type, which made a much nicer, and more useful, page. It's a shame that LL removed it.

You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but it's a mistaken one. There was nothing "wrong" about traffic bots. On the other hand, children in sex was always wrong. In both cases the ToS changed, but nothing changed concerning the wrongness of either of them. Traffic bots are still not wrong in the sense that some people liked to think of them before the ToS change, and children in sex is still wrong - the ToS caught up, that's all. The only thing that changed when the ToS changed was *additional* to those 2 things - that's it's wrong to be in breach of the ToS. The previous states of 'wrong' never changed; i.e. traffic bots were never wrong (until it became a breach of the ToS and then it's breaching the ToS that's wrong), and children in sex was always wrong (regardless of the ToS).

Examples of *very* selective logic and reading.

The rationale for having incoming links improve rankings is that such links indicate an authoritativeness for the page being linked to. Where a site chooses to link to another because the linked site is considered to be useful and relevant.
The parallel in SL would be people putting places that they enjoy in their Picks. That is the rationale for LL to use Picks in search ranking.

I get a constant flow of spam from people wanting to set up links to their websites from some of mine. All they want is incoming links from ranking sites.
It might be standard, but the practice of manufacturing inbound links in order to game ranking is far from reputable. It's a scam. It's dishonest. It's unethical.


Yes. LL encouraged us to optimise.
You would twist that into saying that LL told us to stuff keywords, buy Picks and use any possible exploits.
- it *is* selective reading on your part - and pointless you writing about it.....

The first quote:
There's nothing selective about it. My opinion that cross-linking isn't wrong is just that - my opinion. It isn't written anywhere for me to be selective about. You are right about the rationale concerning IBLs though. Nevertheless, Google specifically suggest getting IBLs rather than wait for any natural ones that may come along. You are entitled to your opinion, but not everyone shares it (see below).

The second quote:
No, Sling. I didn't twist anything like that. You twisted... no - you invented my opinion. LL certainly didn't suggest that we stuff keywords, buy Picks and use exploits, but they did suggest that we optimise our pages. I don't think that anyone thought that LL would be content with keyword-stuffing, because it ruins the pages that are intended to be useful. Picks buying is different. They've known about it for a very long time and they haven't suggested that it shouldn't happen, so what they think isn't known. You don't get to decide their opinion about it, btw. Exploits are merely unexpected abilities, which may be good or bad to use, depending on what they are. It's a shame that they closed the html one, rather than just filter out undesirable html, because it was being used to make pages nicer and sometimes more useful for users.

An ad-farmer would say. "My opinion that ad-farming isn't wrong is just that - my opinion."
There are different types of cross-linking. There is they type where websites see that they complement one another and set up mutual links. In some cases the link of usefulness might be one-way. That's useful to the public. That's the rationale behind a search engine using links for ranking.
Those sites that set up links purely to game ranking are only helping themselves.
Any reasonable person made aware of the situation would agree that such gaming is an abuse.





Do you not think that LL might not be content with keyword stuffing because it games Search?




Ah the memories!
"LL have known about it for a very long time and they haven't suggested....." is the same argument that you repeatedly used in defence of traffic bots.
The same argument could have been put in defence of ad-farming.

As for not knowing what LL might think on Picks, they are very clear now on their intent to prevent gaming of search. Their problem is one of enforcement.
Pick buying is clearly gaming. Something is going to happen eventually.
They we'll see "Pick buying was never wrong. It is simply against the TOS now."

Why then did LL ban traffic bots?
Because some Linden was having a bad hair day -- and not because it was 'wrong'.?




They went on later to blog that they would be taking action against search gaming in general.
It's not something that they can implement and enforce overnight, but they will slowly get there.
They are going in that direction because gaming search is just plain wrong.

There was nothing wrong with ad-farming until LL changed the ToS. It was greatly disliked but it wasn't 'wrong'. Are you trying to make a point of some sort?

In that case, my cross-linking was was fine. The 'owners' of the pages thought the others were worth linking to

Btw, you ought to save that reasoning for your pick-on-picks game because my cross-linking was internal - the equivalent of a website's pages, and nobody has ever found any sort of fault with internal linking to suit better rankings - never. Perhaps you weren't aware that the structure of a website's internal linkages can affect its search engine rankings. (Straight cross-linking isn't the way to do it, though)

Perhaps. Like you, I can't read their minds. But it doesn't matter what the reason is for them doing something. It makes the pages no good for users - that's a good enough reason to change things.

That would be correct if it weren't wrong. Your "memories" are flawed, Sling (but we expect that from you). My big defense of my traffic bots was always that I'd actually asked LL if it was ok to use them and they said yes. Are your memories getting refreshed now?


Yes, they are very clear about gaming now but that doesn't mean that what *you* think of as gaming is also seen as gaming by other people, including LL. They may accept it as being fine, or they may intend doing something against it, or both (fine now - changed mind later). Who knows? You and I certainly don't.

And for the record, there is nothing wrong with picks buying. The only time it could become wrong is if LL make a statement that it will be treated as a ToS violation.

I think it's time you tried to put some common sense into your posts, Sling. You never know - you could actually find yourself winning one of these sometime - but no - that'll never happen.

Not because it was wrong, no. It couldn't be, because there was nothing wrong about it. You don't suppose that it could have been due to lots of people shouting things like "get rid of traffic bots", do you? I.e. they saw that the people wanted it Of course, it might have been the bad hair day as you suggested. Who knows?

That's right. What you can't conclude is that what *you* think of as gaming search, will be what LL thinks of as gaming search. For instance, the opinion that paying for picks is simply competition, is very reasonable because that's exactly what it is.