Big Shuffle in the All Search. Will it last?

The majority do, yes. I have yet to meet an actual customer who says "oh yes I am quite happy to see things appear higher up because the parcel owner was clever with their keywords rather than offering anything good".

The majority of you, Sliong, and a small number of other people do, yes. After that, you are just lying.

You should try asking customers then I have yet to see a customer who was against my use of bots after I told them about it and asked for their opinions.

True. Be aware though that indeed those keywords in the title are important. If you change it to "International House of Style", you might end up high on the keyword "style" or "international", but you would loose ranking on "kimono". The picks will remain though.

Gotcha, thanks.

This probably isn't going to make a difference, but heck, it's not the first time I posted something that didn't make a difference.

Everyone invests a lot of time and energy into their Second Life projects. It's understandable that people get emotional over issues that greatly impact what are essentially their babies.

Personal attacks, however, not only tend to solve nothing, but waste a lot of time and energy and focus that could be used on resolving the tasks at hand.

Sometimes, even when two sides appear to agree on the issue, if they can deal objectively with each other, they can find a solution that doesn't force either to compromise their pinciples and satisfies both.

(My suggestion has always been to either degrade the importance of Traffic altogether, or make it a clickable option by the searcher. If you view traffic bots at the unnecessary evil, my solution should be appealing because one no longer needs to participate in the evil to keep up with competitors. If you view traffic bots as evil, my solution should be appealing, because the benefit of traffic bots will be decreased to the point of no longer being worthwhile. The only people who object are the people who make a living solely from the inertia of Traffic, and I don't see any of those people posting in this thread at least.)

The way I see it, both Phil and Sling are reacting predictably and reasonably to an unfair situation. However, there is no point in trying to decide who's reaction is "better." Rather, the unfair situation to which both are reacting should be removed.

I know I have disagreed with Sling in this thread, and Phil on others, and despite that, neither has treated me with anything but politeness. So I know that it's not true for either that they automatically respond with personal attacks to people disagree with them. And despite the reputation of these forums as been drama-filled, just about everyone who has disagreed with me on any forum issue has done it in a polite manner.

Geez, stop calling each other idiots. It doesn't matter who started it, just stop!

(And my suggestion is if you needed a real focus for your hatred, look toward Linden Lab rather than each other. It is they who have set up the unfair situation to which you are reacting emotionally.)

Find one single person who says "I appreciated seeing that site higher up in the search listings, because they obviously deserved it since they did some clever SEO as opposed to producing anything I might care about. Yes, I want to see shops owned by people who know how keywords work more than ones which aren't."

Or just don't be such a fool.

Thank you.
You have very neatly illustrated the problems caused by search-gamers.

Traffic is intuitively a useful indicator of the worth of a place.
The gamers screwed that one up.

Picks are intuitively a good indicator of the worth of a place.
The gamers screwed that one up.

We're running out of 'obvious' ranking factors - other than the text of parcel pages.
Any ranking factor that is related to avatars is not dependable as an indicator of places that avatars value.

We're left with the text of a parcel page.
There are no sensible IBLS for SL parcels.

Does this mean that someone could join SL one day, set up a BIAB on a 512 and rank as high as a long-standing high-quality merchant loved by all?
Yes.
Why would this be?
It would be that search-gamers have destroyed the meaning of factors that would result in a saner ranking.

Ordinal, I am used to your postings making more sense then this one.

Of course people would be disappointed in a business owner who spent more time/effort in keywords, then in creating good stuff. But every business owner that makes good stuff, needs to be found eventually. So the customer will be glad, when they find the good stuff because the owner also did his/her work in the search department.

Weird is that you name keywords. Keywords are meant to be used for your search ranking. LL even published that. No, they even asked us to optimize those for search. So how on earth could you come up with this keyword example, to show us how most people shares Slings distaste for search gamers? Using the right keywords has got nothing to do with gaming. Sling might believe that but I think you are smarter.

Is it close enough if I said that since I don't care about Traffic in deciding where to go, that it makes no difference to me whether the random order os search results was acquired by traffic bots or something else?

You're assuming that every searcher cares about the accuracy of the Traffic results.

A merchant's use of traffic bots is as meaningful to me as if they fudged their date of birth because search results were ordered by date of birth. They may have cheated some sort of system. But it doesn't change my bottom line as a consumer.

You should be really embarrassed by that post - and you call *me* a fool LOL!

No - quite seriously - you think that _customers want gaming_? You think that they like seeing things higher up the listings because those promoting them were cleverer in posting advertisements?

Ordinal,
Do a search for "Low Prim Furniture". Last time I looked Phil was on #1, and I was on #4. Both Phil and me spent much time and effort in SEO (without talking about the bots even).
Now it happens to be that both me and Phil sell stuff that someone using these keywords, DOES care about. Phil sells about a thousand low prim furniture items, myself probably not more then 200. If you read these forums often, you see many people liking Phil's stuff. Now I have been told myself by many customers that they love what I created as well.

So who is the fool in this case? Is there only a choice between performing good SEO, and creating good stuff? Did it ever occur to you that one can do both?

I apologise to you and the other forum members, Amity - but not to Sling.

I've always said that I only attack after I've been attacked, which happens quite a lot But, the other day, I decided to attack first with Sling, and abandon any attempt at any discusion with him/her, simply because s/he is incapable of rational discussion on this subject. Plus, after all this time, s/he still doesn't have much of a clue about it.

Customers only want one thing: Finding what they are looking for. So if the top rankers actually sell what the customer was looking for, they are pleased. Do you really think the average customer cares on how the store gets their ranking, if the store has what they look for?

If you hadn't started in this thread with a lie, and followed it by calling me a fool, I might have discussed it with you. But you did those things, so I have no intention of showing you where your argument went wrong. If you can't see it, that's the way it is. And you call *me* a fool LMAO!

In the real world, some consumers make the assumption, "If a lot of other people are buying a product, it must be a good product, so I can feel safe buying it too." It's not a perfect assumption, and I could point out a lot of businesses who make money over a long period of time selling crap. Just like I could point out businesses who make a far better product than established competitors, because the masses would rather stick to the safe pick of going where others have gone before.

However, all-in-all, it's a pretty safe strategy. In the real world. But there are a lot of factors that exist in our real world that don't exist on Second Life that make it an effective strategy in the real world.

In a free competitive market-place, especially in our information age, there are lots of places to get consumer information. If your consumer strategy is to follow the pack, it's safe because you can be sure that the initial pack probably made good decisions.

However, in Second Life: (1) There are very few avenues over which information about consumer purchases can travel; (2) Search, along with the overwhelming factor of Traffic, so dominates any other forms of information or advertising, that merchants must obsess over it; there is no viable alternative; (3) Traffic is not even accurate in measuring sales; it only measures how much time someone spent on a place, it is a POOR indicator of a shop's sales or prior customer satisfaction even when not gamed.

Heck, at a certain margin, it is advantageous for one's shop to rez slowly, because that extra minute an avatar waits for the rez is an extra point of Traffic.

I see where you think that Traffic is an intuitive measure of worth. In real life, a business's sales volume could be an indicator of the product's value. But Traffic isn't an accurate measure, and the circumstances of Second Life don't allow for it to be used that way.

So you don't have any clever alternative. Cool. Then you can shut up with the whining and pointing fingers and yammering "They brokes it!" and just accept that in SL (as in literally every other place in the web where some sort of search is used) search is not as you want it to be.

Is this applicable if you split a parcel too? I was told that if you split a parcel then the all the associated picks will become invalid thus negating their contribution to your search result.

Interesting question, and one that I don't know the answer to. But my best guess is this...

For a start, when splitting a parcel, it must be split so that one peice is bigger than the other. Then the biggest piece will keep the orginal data. My best guess about picks is that those that were created when on what is now the biggest piece, will continue to count for it. But those that were created on what is now the smallest piece won't count for any parcel.

It's easy to check by creating a pick on, say, the edge of a largish parcel. Then cutting that spot off and seeing what the pick says in the profile. Picks that are no longer counting say <no parcel> in the little box at the bottom.

ETA:
I should have said that all the picks do *not* become worhless. I've cut small parcels off from my store's large parcel without losing the picks. It's really whether or not the picks that were created on what becomes the small parcel are affected, and I feel sure that they will no longer count for any parcel.

Honestly, I doubt that a lot of people are that concerned whether they visit a shop with products of quality X with SEO +1 before one that has products of quality X with SEO -1. Either way they can purchase products of quality X.

However, ask them whether SEO should affect search rankings over actual quality and they will say "no". Nobody in the history of everything (who has not received a crippling blow to the head) has thought that they should be more aware of worse products because the advertisers have been clever.

I dare say that everyone posting here has products of the utmost quality of course. But SEO, beyond "making sure that you mention things you offer in a way that the SEs concerned can understand", is gaming.

You missed it.
In the absence of gaming being stamped on, the alternative is the parcel text.

LL say that they will police traffic-botting by auditing the high-ranking parcels.
They can eventually apply that to other gaming of ranking factors.

Thanks Phil. Two more questions if I may

1) What if I change my land name, will the existing Picks (with the old name) still mean something as a Search criterium? I mean: the number of Picks is one of the criteria for ranking in the All Search. Let's suppose 100 avis have a Pick of my shop with the old name. When I change my land name, will these 100 Picks have any value in Search ranking, or do I start again with 0 Picks?

2) Same question as 1, but now I don't change my land name but an avi changes the name of the Pick him/herself. Does that changed Pick keep on counting in the Search ranking?

Phil was so sure that he knew the world, that he developed a special bot system. He described it in another thread.
Basically it allows a traffic-botter to maintain the highest possible number of bots without getting ARed for using excessive avatar slots in a sim. As people arrive into the sim, the system takes bots out. As people leave the sim, the system brings the bots back in.
He developed a system designed to abuse traffic to the maximum possible extent while avoiding being AR for excessive consumption of resources.
He developed a system to maximise an abuse that most people agree is unfair.

And then, just as he had completed it ...
LL turned around and made this unfair practice a TOS offence.

Phil got it very wrong. - in more ways than one.




In this thread, Phil posts that LL can not change the algorithms.
He's saying that because he thinks that the GSA is set in concrete and is the only ranking game in town

For whatever reasons, he says this despite the fact that LL have blogged that they intend to change the system

He's got it wrong ..... again.

@ Paulo: What happens is this...

For avatars that have html pages, their picks are listed in their html pages, and the title of each pick becomes the link text that links to the parcel's page. That link text is the name of the parcel, and, as link text, it is important for rankings for the parcel.

If I take a pick on your parcel today, your parcel's name will become that important link to text from my avatar's html page to your parcel's html page. If you then change your parcels' name, the link text on my html page won't change at all, and it will still count as that text for your parcel. If I change the name in the pick in my profile, it *will* change the link text to your parcel on my html page, and *my* words will count for your parcel in search.

Welcome to the Pointless Gaming Forum.

Passes the time, I suppose.