Anatomy of a Fail

Ok we can keep going back and forth all day saying the same thing over and over if you want. She was looking for content from an honest creator and she didn't find it. The bots are the reason she ended up there. They wasted her time. She went away empty handed because the store didn't have what she wanted. Content from an honest creator was not available there.

lol you made my day

If 2 things are so different, using the same logic gives a false image in my opinion, but let it be.
The main difference you and I have, is (we both should not be surprised at that) about what is honest and dishonest. The way I see it, you are idealistic, where I am more realistic. As long as the 'law' permits it, it is not dishonest. So as long as for example Google permits those linksites (they set the 'law' for their engine), there is nothing wrong with them. As long as LL permitted those traffic bots, there was nothing wrong in using them.

We are talking business here, and business is seldom based on idealism. If my main goal in SL is making money, I will use the tools LL (and the other SL users) provides me with, to get my revenue. Classifieds, paying people for picks, using bots (when still allowed). Now I never used bots because I did not want to bother with a 24/7 pc with 20 bots running, and chose to focus on Search All, but I still think it was perfectly within my rights to use them before the blog entry.

Exactly what is 'gaming' a search engine? As long as you offer what you advertise (not necessarily selling, could be an informational website as well), you are not fooling people. You simply use the information available to you, to rank as high as you can get. The more effort you put in your ranking, the higher you could get. So when is it still called optimizing, and when is it called gaming?

The mistake you make (according to my definition that is), is that people, or businesses, are entitled to a ranking. No one deserves a certain ranking. In order to rank at a certain spot, one has to work hard. Of course not in an idealistic world, but we don't live in one. People find out how a system works, and optimize their behavior (within the limits set by the system, so they get the optimum out of it. And as soon as the first person finds out, the rest can either follow, or cut their losses. That is, whether you like it or not, reality.

Back to SL: In an ideal SL, people would only take a pick of a place if they like it enough. But it went wrong right away: People liked a place because it was their friends place, not because it was actually one of the 10 best they knew about. So people with the most friends, got the most picks. And then it went even further wrong, when LL told us that picks count for search ranking: People started actively harvesting picks, by paying others. So now picks represent who is befriended with who, or who pays someone.
None if this is cheating, gaming, or dishonest. People put the pick up because they like a place, be it for friendship, beauty of the place, or money payed. And reality is that a business owner knows the need for picks for his ranking, so they will find ways to get picks. Again, nothing dishonest.

Back to SL AND on-topic: In an ideal SL, traffic represents the popularity of a place. But if people know they are easily found by getting more traffic, they find ways to get people to their land (i.e. camping). And in the end, even that was not needed, as traffic bots were invented. Simply to anticipate to the knowledge about traffic and rankings. Not dishonest at all, as this was all allowed by the people setting our rules. Even one step further, not dishonest now either, if you want to take the risk. Against the rules of this platform, but not dishonest. At least as long as they do offer what they promise in their parcel description. Remember, but runners do not promise traffic, they promise goods (apart from mall owners that search renters). They use traffic as a way to get a ranking.


And I say most people don't give a damn. A handful of vocal people show they either do think it is unfair (you for example) and a handful of vocal people think it is not unfair (me for example). Tests like Phil did, where his revenue went down as soon as he removed the bots, show that people do not care. But you know probably as well as I do,that when I ask someone out of the blue: Do you think search gaming is unfair, they will say: yes sure it is!


Well in another topic I did read that they started some enforcement, but I am pretty convinced of the fact this policy is a failure. Even if they manage to shut down the top 500 of bot users, the policy will fail. Because we will get back camping, so in the end nothing changes. People doing very good business can afford 20 campers 24/7, new businesses cannot. As long as traffic is the key for Places Search, people will get artificial traffic.

There's really no room for dispute here: the OP did not find what she wanted, else she'd have it now. It's not up to anybody else to tell her what she wanted. Evidently she wanted something more than pretty plant prims.

Similarly, if I were running a showcase of scripting, it wouldn't include scripts from the arms merchants to griefers, no matter how cleverly they were written nor how innocuous the instance. Would I miss out on wondrous scripts? Not so much. There are plenty of clever scripts. There are plenty of pretty plants. There are more all the time.

The situation here is not just buying a prim to sit on. It's more like entering into a business relationship, prominently displaying a creator's products; not too much to ask, I think, that this creator not be flouting the official rules--that is, not be an embarrassment.

LL's announced traffic manipulation policy changes the game, quite literally. Before the announcement it was a defensible position that trafficbots were just optimizing LL's own metric. Now it is explicitly against the rules. It is no more defensible than griefing.

Personally I think, however, that neither the botrunners nor their customers are the most self-deluded in all this. The heads most deeply buried in the sand belong to folks who imagine that they are thriving "on real traffic." In almost every instance, they'd benefit if traffic disappeared completely from Search ranking. They are thriving *despite* traffic, but just don't realize it, having struggled all this time to score in a game in which they aren't even contestants.

The whole plant market is totally borked. I just spent 4 hours searching for plants in places and visiting almost 60 garden ceters. OMG my eyes are burning. By my reckoning real garden center stores with real traffic, looking at the honest businesses in this market, shouldn’t have more than about 4-5000 traffic.

That means the top 60 garden centres in places are using traffic bots to game the system. The top 30 being the absolute worst offenders. The top 10 have the most obsurdly high traffic and some of the most mediocre content ever. My eyes, my eyes they are burning. Will they ever recover from the assault they have received from these botanical spamming bot masters !!



Isablan’s comment about photosourced plants was a catalyst. I have made a great discovery. I now know why SL can often look so terrible. And the main offendors are PHOTOSOURCED PLANTS. They are vile. I have just been to 60 garden centers and seen the SAME photo plants in nearly all of them. 60 garden centers and nearly all of them using the same photos. OMG these photoplants are terrible. Now I realise the secret terrible truth.

PHOTO SOURCED PLANTS look like zombie, night of the living dead plants, ripped from RL. They are frozen moments from another dimension and they don’t belong in SL at all. They are so out of place here, I realise now.

Even the best, good quality crisp photo based plants look odd, freakish and frozen and somehow dead, with their different shadows and different lighting and different palettes. They are an assault to the eyes. Horrid.

And guess what all the garden centers that use traffic bots all have the EXACT same selection of photosourced plants, either ‘borrowed’ from the web or bought in photoplant texture packs.

These people can’t really be called creators, as throwing a texture you didn’t make, on to a one prim sculpty you didn’t make is more similar to collating or re-presenting. It is NOT creating. The whole plant market is borked. There is almost no choice. ALMOST EVERY GARDEN CENTER HAS THE SAME PLANTS AND TREES TEXTURES TO OFFER.

Why isn’t the plant market more like clothes and avatar accessories where you see dozens of genuinely creative people offer an amazing selection of products.

I am not surprised that the OP is having problems finding new genuine plant creators, they are almost impossible to find, invisible in the current spamtastic, bot driven, botanical photo dross that’s available.

You are wrong regarding new creators,
New and upcoming creators had 2 choices before the bot blog: Focus on Search All, and/or focus on traffic (Places Search). Since anyone with a pc that can run 24/7 could employ 20 bots with no costs, traffic was easy to get for everyone.
After the blog, new and upcoming creators have only one choice: focus on Search All. Traffic can only be generated by camping and such, which costs a lot of lindens. Most upcoming creators do not have those amounts.

Now I would advice new creators to use Search All anyway, since I think that is the future. But by banning traffic bots, they actually made it more difficult for new people to get the traffic they want, while the established people earn enough to pay a camping army.

Finally: I only use genuine traffic as well, and though I do not have your traffic numbers yet, I do run pretty well. So working without bots does work

Alot of the argument is over winning or losing. I personally see arguing over that as foolish because the definition of "win" or "lose" is entirely dependent on the person in question.

There are people that feel that staying true to ones ethics/morals/principals/beliefs at all times is a WIN regardless of any other factors. I suspect the OP falls in or somewhere near this category. SO to her walking away from beautiful content because the actions of the creator violated her principals IS a very big win.

We could keep going back and forth on it, but there's no point. She said it herself in her post:-

There's no mention of anything other than new plants that she doesn't already have. The extra is something that you've added. She found what she wanted - and left empty-handed. She failed, whereas the owner of the place succeeds.

Actually, Eli had it right. I wasn't there to buy, I was there to offer that creator free space to sell and show their wares on a sim that averages 12k - 15k traffic (real traffic) to get them exposure.

I'll only offer that to someone with ethics who isn't using fraud to falsify their numbers.

And I would have found them without the traffic bots, I blew past all the places with traffic that I knew was gamed and stuck mostly in places where the traffic numbers were realistic *if the content was compelling enough.*

The answer is very simple.
You create content in a website/parcel. You put thought into how that content is presented for easy navigation and understanding.
The deliverable for the searcher is the content on your site. Your site may include references to other sites that you consider to be helpful to the interests of people who find your content useful. Other sites do the same if they consider that your content is useful.

WHY.... do search engines take inbound links into account?
The answer is that the engine is attempting to form a measure of the authoritativeness of a site in relation to search terms.

What is gaming?
One form of gaming is the generation of inbound links that are purely aimed at increasing the ranking. The typical spamvertised linking sites contain nothing of value to the searcher. They simply contain lists of URLs to feed the search engines in an attempt to manipulate the rankings.
The aim of the search engine is to deliver highly-relevant listings. The link farms work against this by attempting to drown out the effect of the organic links between sites that have gained those links due to the quality of their content. That's gaming.





The mistake that you make is in thinking that behaviour only becomes dishonest once a government moves to make that dishonest behaviour illegal.
The mistake that you make is in thinking that those who refuse to engage in dishonest behaviour are at fault for not doing so while that dishonest behaviour is not illegal.

I'd go along with that, more or less. From the OP's point of view, she won by refusing to buy, and the seller wins by selling more. Everyone's a winner

But the discussion is about "failing", according tio the thread's titles. To be perfectly honest, I don't know if she succeeded or not in the end. All we know is that she failed to acquire what she set out to look for, at that point in her proceedings. But she said that the seller failed, when s/he didn't. The seller has been succeeding because of the bots, and one person turning away because of them doesn't constitue failure.

When my local free weekly newspaper arrives this afternoon it will have plenty of leaflets in it for local business in the area, that's why I get the newspaper for free. I also regularly get leaflets through the door for local fast food establishments, I don't actually mind this sort of advertising because it doesn't have my name and address on it and I can throw it away.

I've been off work this week on annual leave and have received phone calls from differing companies, some I'm already with, such as my bank and others are trying to sell me mobile phones. These calls are nearly always irritating.

At work I get shed loads of people trying to contact me, existing suppliers as well as new suppliers, I try to avoid these calls because they're irritating but now and again we get one or two we find beneficial and we will engage with these businesses and these calls aren't all from small business, world known brands engage in these practices.

Traffic bots will hardly ever put me off buying a product, nor will camping chairs, money trees, freebies, hunts, wonder chairs, money orbs yadda yadda yadda. If I'm looking for a store or an advertising location the aforementioned may put me off as I'm not looking for that sort of traffic.

As for good creators being able to generate good traffic, I don't buy that argument, good creators do not always make good marketing choices, it's a different ball game. Traffic bots do seem to be a lazy marketing technique.

I'm not and never will be a big fan of traffic, but traffic does have its place but I've said it before that I can get better sales with three figure traffic than locations with five figure traffic, it's what's attracting people to the parcel that drives sales.

Based on recent events it seems that if Jack can't tell the difference between a camper and a bot he'll treat the camper the same as the bot.

I think we'll get more lucky chairs and fewer campers and bots.

Ah. You were looking for something for nothing then. The seller still succeeds because of the bots, and I imagine that your offer wouldn't have been worth a tiny fraction of the bot-generated success. So it could hardly be called a failure.

A blog post is on its way about this due to confusion on the policy. Jack didn't expand any further than that so I don't know in which direction this is heading.

Straight down the road paved with good intentions, I'm pretty sure.

If it's the same blog post that was due early this week, it's a bit late, but it does give an indication of the level of interest that LL have in the matter - precious little.

For a perhaps small segment of shopper, in certain areas, I think bots might be hurting their business.

When I shop for apparel and avatar accessories I tend to skip over the things that have very high traffic numbers. I don't want to wear what everyone else is wearing.

Blogs done on "Jack Time" are often late, Jack has a different concept of "soon" to the rest of us but he gets there in the end

She did mention it in a follow-up post. She said, "Actually, I didn't find what I was looking for. I was looking for talented creators who deserved a spot on a popular sim that showcases the plant life of SL."
You are just choosing to ignore that because it doesn't support your argument.

Don't be so sure, Phil. Anytime I have talked to people about plants the first plase they mention is Botanical Gardens. It's always mentioned in blogs and forums posts about plants. I would say the bot-runner falied because he missed out on some great free advertising.

Alight

But I still say that the seller didn't "fail" on account of the OP leaving empty-handed. The OP wasn't even contemplating buying anything and the bots have no doubt brought many sales that wouldn't have been gained without them.

I guess the question is... would the vendor have more success by gaming traffic with bots or by being showcased in the Botanical Garden?

Maybe s/he did miss a small amount of free advertising, assuming that plants from different creators are there and that the gardens are enjoyed by people rather than people go there to find out where to buy plants. Given that sort of choice, I'd much rather have the sales that bots help to generate, and I wouldn't consider that missing the small bit of advertising was in any way a failure for me. There's no contest.

Well she stated in another follow-post that she gets 12K traffic withoput gaming, so I would say it's a safe assumption that her gardens are enjoyed by people. Like I said... anytime I have seen someone ask the question "where's a good place to go for plants" BG is one of the first things people recommend, so yes... people do go there looking to buy.