Poll: would you pay more than 50L for an ad with new search?

I did a bit of optimization there, Phil, for my parcels, much in the way that I did for my classified ad. Yet my rental centers show up on page 10. Rather, one of them. I haven't dug deep enough to find the other, but it's pushing it after page 10. For apartments, #1 is Acropolis Gardens, which uses the term all of twice. I suppose it has a lot of inbound links.

#2: Miramar Apartments. Uses the word all of twice. I sincerely doubt it has the amount of inbound links as Acropolis Gardens, unless someone is killing the game with alts.

#3: Seaside Apartments. Uses the word all of twice. Again, I doubt they have THAT many inbound links.

Me. I've tagged the term 5 times in a non-spammy, coherent manner. I'm on page 10. That's just the first of the two rental centers. My profile showed up somewhere in the teens.... my prefab land is on page 18... The other rental center, which had an identical description, shows up on page 21. And that one presumably has more traffic.

I can't tell you with confidence that it works, Phil. I've gone and tried again, and I have an idea of what to do, by putting objects on the land with the apartment names, but that option isn't terribly feasible because I need the prims.

Cristalle,

You may notice that my land appears on page 4 of the generic "search all" and page 3 if you search "hotel." It looks like the generic "search all" is what you're talking about here, right?

I typed out a description of how I did it, but then I erased it and decided I'd show you in-world sometime instead of giving away the farm here. Just IM me.

Yes, Avion, that was the generic search of any category. Classifieds is not the problem - I'm #1 there for my desired keyword. But I'm showing how Search All is a waste for me, even when I've done my optimization. I'll buzz you later or tomorrow to see about it.

has anyone tested if the classifieds count towards search relevancy?

Instead of placing one L$ 500 ad and getting a handful of clicks, make ten L$ 50 ads and see if that brings you up in the search listing. (I can see this leading to hundreds of alts loaded with ads )

Cristalle,

I'd say forget about trying to getting listed in searches for "apartments" but try related searches.

Lets say a good listing for apartments will bring you 100 people a day interested in apartments. What you want to do is get high rankings with other search phrases. If you are placed well in 10 search phrases that bring you 20 people each you will be better off than getting the apartment rankings.

oh and BTW your number 4 and 5 in a search for "rental center" Well I think that is you.

Cristalle:

The first thing you need to do is think about what people are most likely to search on when they are looking for what you have. 'apartments', yes, but there also others, such as 'apartments to rent' (which also covers the single word, apartments), etc., and you need to incorporate the most likely of them into the land's name and description, with *the* most important one (or two) in the name. A good way of finding them is to ask plenty of people what they would type in if they were looking for what you have.

I had a quick look at the results for 'apartments'. Basically you need links, more links, and even more links, which means getting your places into people's Picks and LMs - AFTER you've improved the names and descriptions, so that the link text is better.

Prominence is a factor and is measured by how near the top of the page a word is, and in the case if names, how near the front it is. So place your best searchterm right at the front of the name, and at or very near the front of the description. There is no need to occupy those places with the business name - that can be placed at the end.

You could also use some page content with the best searchterms incorporated - objects on the land. You already have objects on the land, so set them to show in search (they don't need to be for sale), and tailor their descriptions to include your best searchterms. Use multiple objects for each searchterm, and use many many objects that are already on the land. If you have to use plants, use them, but create plenty of page content.

The objective is to make the land's html page very relevant to the searchterm(s). The page content is one part of that, and links with the right link text is the other part - the most improtant part.

Yes, I figured out that I basically need to create an alt farm with links, because increasing relevance on the html alone apparently doesn't cut the mustard. I have already put the search term in my title and a number of times in the body of the description. It's coherent and not spammy at all, and far more descriptive than the top 3 entries for that keyword. I will tinker with it again, though.

Parcel descriptions, however, are very limited so I have to pick a key word or phrase and run with it. I don't have the luxury like I do with a classified to tag each keyword as often as I'd like. I am not worried about my classified ad, it is where I want it to be and at a level I'm comfortable paying. The parcel listing, well, that is another story and I'm not sure how badly I want to get to #1, because I know it's going to need me to exploit methods I find to be less than savory.

If you mean an alt farm that you mentioned in your previous post, it wouldn't work anyway. You need Picks and LMs that are counted as links.

Yes, Phil, I am aware of that - making a slew of alts and loading them with picks. I find that distasteful. And camping them out for the few extra inbound links for traffic.

I used to think that, too, because I use web-based search a lot and that defaults to Mature-off. If you enable Mature in your searches (which I only know how to do when doing New Search from within the client), the classifieds listings for a given keyword are, in fact, listed in decending order of amount paid, just like ye olde Classifieds tab.

And by "web-based" search, I mean using Nina Stepford's Firefox plug-in or just pasting in the URL like this one for "freebies."

http://secondlife.com/app/search/search?q=freebies

(Note that I'm also in the camp of people who believe that New Search is the cause of all the 503 errors, since it appears to be done on the same servers.)

Speaking of which, Phil, did you ever figure out the thing about certain alts not being including in the search? I have a couple of alts that have my store listed in their picks but they don't show up when I check in search.

No, Cristalle. I mean that creating a slew of new alts and having your place in their Picks, won't work, because they won't be coutned as links. And we're not talking about traffic. Forget alts and bots altogether - you need links, links, and more links.

Hi Bradley. No I didn't. I didn't find something common in the obvious possibilities, and I really don't understand it.

Sorry, but I just don't believe landmarks make a difference until someone can show that they do (ie a link to the page that has all the landmark links like the 12 "Top XXX" pages).

They might at one point have considered it, but if it was activally making a collection of every landmark in every avie's inventory then that would have shown up on a link: search and it never did.

It's what was posted in the blog originally, Kitty. They said that they count the number of links to a page, which included landmarks, and it's quite possible that they do, but store it as a number rather than as data. Whether it was a mistake in the post or not, or a discarded intention or not, it doesn't hurt to assume that it happens.

Picks count, landmarks don't. There is a potential problem with the Picks factoring though. If you use New Search for a given place in SL, only a portion of residents (about 1/3) who have that place in their picks will show up in the results. So is it only 1/3 of those people who end up factoring into your search placement? Or does that code actually find all people with a given spot in Picks, whereas search results do not?

Look up the official explanation of how traffic is calculated sometime and you'll realize why I'm sceptical .

Must be a nice little earner for LL.... you pay shed loads of money to have your porn... ermm ad up the top of our listing... then we bork tp's so you can't get there.. and screw the vendor scripts so you can only pay for something, not actually get anything, then we will cap IM's and loose NC's so you cannot contact the supplier.... all in all, a great service.. but only for LL so it seems.
Oh, then we will rollback the system so you now loose what you bought, assuming you recieved it in the first place.

Sorry for the confusion - we are no longer including classified ads mixed into the "all" search results.

In the new All Search tab, classified ads are ONLY appearing on the right hand side with all relevant keyword searches, sorted by price paid (they are pulled exactly as they appear in the Classifieds tab). They appear in the column labeled "CLASSIFIEDS (paid ads)" and will carry over to other pages as well (ie: the first 10 on the first page of results, the next 10 on the next page of results, etc).

We hope to build a more robust classifieds system in the future - watch for announcements over the next few months.

Thanks for the response, Jeska.

Well, here is a peculiarity. My classified tp's have dropped from double digits daily to low single digits. Unless the stats are borked, there are significantly less people looking at my classified ad. 2 days, only 6 teleports. This is way down from getting 12-20 visits in a day. That's disturbing and a relief at the same time - a relief in that I may be able to save up some cash! I also notice that my 50L ad hasn't gotten any play in a few days, averaging a small handful per week.

However: I made some changes and now am showing up on page 3 of the new all search. That's somewhat comforting. Nothing unethical yet to get the few extra links.... but some more tweaks and I think I'll be happy... well as much as I can be for now. But here is the kicker: my visitor counter tells me that I've gotten 151 visitors since we had our little discussion last week. Where are they coming from? That would be on par with the normal usage I saw before the new search kicked in.

Do I bother anymore with a classified?

I'm not sure if I'm following you but surely they're coming from search, or you have a nearby attraction.

As for bothering with a classified anymore, that's upto you but as it's going to take months to do anything about the sorry mess they've created, I'd been inclined to say that middle of the road classifieds are worthless.

I have a very short range on my visitor counter, so people have to get very close to it to count as a visit - something like 5-10 meters.

The rental center is a bit north of the approximate middle of a residential sim I own in its entirety. To the east, there are some shops nearby, and some sex club in the approximate middle of that sim, but I sincerely doubt that the traffic is coming from there since most people will not have their draw distance that far. The sim north of me has land for sale and some huge building that I don't know what it is, but I never see it having any large attractions. Plus you would have to peek through my apartment buildings to see the rental center. The sim west of me has some rentals and a mall of some sort, but it's a lot of open space and again, a significant draw distance away. South of me is a house builder's display land - again, needs significant draw distance and to sift through all the houses in the lower half of the sim.

I suspect that the new search is actually getting some traction. I wish we could track those teleports too. But in the absence of that, all I have is my visitor counter, which seems to suggest that the classified is going the way of the dodo and I can slice my ad budget significantly.

Well I'm finding if I put a higher priced classified, I get slightly more traffic, more business but, and it's a big but, the amount of people TP'ing from the higher paid classified is so minimal it wouldn't make much difference if I dropped it.

So, I'm confused!

I typically found that to be the case, but I don't know anymore. My ad has never been at the top, but usually on the first page of classifieds. That was good enough until the last week.

So I decided to pay a little more for my classified ad and get closer up toward the middle of the first page in the property rental category of the old classifieds. Since Saturday, I have recorded only 5 teleports and 1 map. I used to get at least three times as much per day.

My visitor counter, however, tells a vastly different story - 64 visitors! I think I'm going to pull the plug on the expensive classified and see if that makes a difference in the visitor count. If it's not a significant difference, I will just have to thank Linden Lab for the opportunity to save some cash.