Porky Gorky

Gunner Grun wrote: I don't want to Hijack this thread but why is it when I put out 315 keyword spam prims using the same words as the number one guy and I mean the same took me 8 hours. I went for the bottom of page 1 to the top of page 6. There are other factors taken into account as well as keywords, most notably land size and keyword diversity on the plot. For your experiment to work you would need to replicate all the factors existing on the number one guys land and apply them to your own. That involves fully understanding how search works and there are not many around that do. cough "Darrius" cough

I don't know what the policy is but from someone who has sold allot of prefabs and built over 100 custom sims, my work has appeared in allot of places without my consent. From other players sales advertising, to in-world publications, to machinima, to an episode of The Office on NBC to Linden Labs advertising for SL. Regarding LL I thought I might be able to get some free tier out of them so I contacted them in 2009 and asked them to remove the offending image from their website or to compensate me fairly for my contribution. Their answer was basically All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Regarding anyone else using my content to help advertise their own....I don't mind at all. It's all free advertising for me and extra bonus if they make the effort to cedit me for it.

Gunner Grun wrote: I went from 5th to 9th on page one. The biz that was at number one for months now is at number two and still has 315 keyword spamming prims. Search is so messed up.:smileysad: Not all keyword spamming prims are bad or unfair, they can help search be more relevant if they are not abused. For example I have over 1000 items for sale. They are all in sale vendors and demo vendors, therefore I am unable to use keywords effectively as the products themselves are not permanently rezzed on the land. So I have about 800 extra prims rezzed, all with keywords to reflect the products in the vendors. Without utilising keyword prims my store would be buried in search and search would not offer a proper reflection of the qty and type of items I sell. Sure, people game the be-jesus out of search by using keyword prims inappropriately, but the mere presence of keyword spam prims doesn't automatically mean that the owner is gaming the system to deceive people or to gain an unfair advantage, they may just be gaming the system to make a very ineffective search engine, more effective.

Yay I am back in the #1 spot for my best keywords. I hereby declare that Search is fixed!

Prad Prathivi wrote: Ahh, this thread is full of total win! Carry on as you are! I hope this teaches you a lesson about the dangers of creating inflammatory parody graphs young man. They are dangerous and will incite SL drama for many years to come. Now go to your room and have a good hard think about your reckless behaviour.

Zanara Zenovka wrote: Picks were useful to see which merchants had to resort to ludicrous gaming to promote their products, and were therefore best avoided. Maybe for you on a personal level that was the best use of picks. For allot of other people though, picks were used to dominate and dictate search rankings to great effect. Picks were one of the more easily gamed search factors and with a large L$ investment it was very easy to secure the number 1 rank on lots of keywords in a very short amount of time. I know, because I did it. The downside was it drove away a few potential customers (like yourself) who were apposed to paying for picks. The upside was it bought in thousands of other visitors who didn't care less about search gaming and went on to purchase products. So yeah, I say bring back picks. We cannot rely on Linden Labs to produce a set of relevant search results. We have to rely on ourselves to game search in order to get our businesses to show up in relevant search results (at least within the first 5 pages) and picks offered an easily understandable way to do that.

My in-world sales have returned to normal over the last 7 days but SLM sales have declined more, last 2 weeks they have been about 50% down overall.

These are good questions Greek and allot of us have been asking them for a long time now, ever since M Linden, Joe Linden and Jack Linden steered the company down this path of self destruction. My guess is no, LL will not be making a conscientious effort to help drive up sales and help shop keepers in world. To be honest I don't think I want their help. Every time LL makes an "improvement" things just seem to get worse. There seems to be a severe lack of coordination when it comes to improving the platform mainly caused by the flawed Tao management style. Teams go on developing their projects (like inworld search) with little accountability for their faliures, constantly diminishing the usefulness of the technology in the process. Same with V2 and also with the marketplace to a lesser extent. In my opinion LL has lost focus of the core issues that exist in SL today and they have lost touch with the core needs of the user-base, either that or they don't care anymore. Rodvik has been in SL for 3 months and made zero impact, if anything the situation for merchants has deteriorated further in that time especially with all the privacy issues that have come to light recently. We are facing even harder times ahead I fear.

I only sell 1 adult item on the MP out of about 1200 'G' rated products across multiple accounts. Sales in the last 7 days have been down about 50% on SLM and about 25% inworld compared to the last 4 weeks. Judging by other merchants comments in this thread, it's clear that the latest change to the Marketplace cannot be solely to blame for this recent decline in sales.

I'd pay good money for an SL teleporter that turned me into a fly. You should put that on your to-do list Darrius.

Josh Susanto wrote: "You don't want the Teleporter anyway, there's a bug in it." -Seth Brundle I love that movie

I closed my Facebook account 3 years ago. I have absolutely no exposure to anything Linden Labs does via Facebook.

Without effective reporting associated with listing enhancements then this feature is still in beta IMO. If they have doubled the price then exactly what improvements have they made to justify this increase? Care to comment Brooke Linden?

Phil Deakins wrote: As time goes by, the marketplace is becoming the normal place to shop for SL goods and inworld stores are becoming the abnormal way. It's LL's doing, and it's intentional. So I think it's a bit rich, to say the least, that a Linden suggests discussiing "Inworld Marketing and Advertising Best Practises" when they are doing their utmost to undermine all of it. I agree Phil, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of Muppets are running this show? Driving sales to SLM results in less traffic in-world which results in less requirement for commercially used land which results in less tier in LL's pocket. So the question is, does the increased commission from SLM sales offset the loss in tier from in-world merchants? If it doesn't then someone (else) needs to get fired.

Robert Galland Yes I agree. LL efforts to drive the sale of 3D content from a 3D world onto a 2D website does seem to be succeeding. Who'd have thunk it? What's worse, the tactic they have used to achieve this is to seemingly de-value all the search systems in world. This is forcing people to down-tier or give up in world stores entirely. Are LL really sacrificing all this tier just so they can take a 5% commision on more items on SLM? I think we have arrived at this point purely by accident mainly through the poor deveopment of GSA 6 and V2 Re. freebies, I think L$10 is a low enough cut off point. Sure you are still going to have allot of low level products priced at L$11 but I think the volume of overall freebie style products would be greatly reduced from the main marketplace. I think it would be worth LL running some experiments on this. You are right, they were proposing to charge a listing fee on freebies. I found this on Daniel Voyager's blog just to remind is all of what was planned. I think we will see some of these listing fees introduced sometime down the road. http://tinyurl.com/6kae6n5 Date 20th Nov 2009: We will enact the following new controls for the Xstreet SL Marketplace within 90 days, with at least two weeks’ notice, in order to improve the shopping experience: Monthly Listing Fee for Freebies of L$99: Listings for free items will now be treated as a marketing/promotional tool and thus will have a price. L$99 is the price of our least expensive listing enhancement and so we will start there. Depending upon desire for this marketing opportunity and perceived value given such demand, we will adjust the price as necessary to maximize this value and keep the freebie listings from becoming bloated again. Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days Minimum Commission of L$3 on all items priced L$1 or greater: We will enact a minimum commission of L$3 on all sales of non-freebie listings. Since Freebie listings are now considered marketing and are charged as such, they will not incur this fee. A L$3 commission will raise the commission on all listings under L$50. This was a range suggested by residents, but it turns out that this is the price range where there is a very high transaction volume and low commission income which combine to cover the costs of those transactions. We may adjust this minimum commission as we see its effects on the marketplace. L$3 does not cover the full cost of a transaction, but the goal here is first to manage freebie growth first. Expected Delivery: 30 – 60 days Monthly Listing Fee of L$10 for all items L$1 or greater: All non-freebie listings will now be charged L$10 per month to remain listed in the Xstreet SL Marketplace Currently, less than 20% of Xstreet SL listings make at least one sale per month. This displays just how much clutter of unsold items exists on Xstreet SL. Doing this will provide an incentive for merchants to remove listings which are not selling, while keeping this fee low enough to have a minimal effect on listings which are selling and are desired by shoppers. By reducing the overall number of listings on Xstreet SL, the shopping experience will drastically improve which will please our shoppers and be a boon to the business of all of our merchants. Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 days Separate freebies into their own category: There is already a freebie section on Xstreet SL. This section will become the place to browse for new freebies. We will remove free listings from the browsable categories and keyword search results on Xstreet SL. Expected Delivery: 60 – 90 day

Pamela Galli wrote: I think you can still pay for Picks if you want, but since they don't count for search, there is no point. I don't see any way for LL to monitor this system's use. The only way I see to neutralize it is for everyone to use it, so everyone has a billion stars and cancels one another out. When people started paying for picks I was sick of watching my search rank get relegated on a daily basis, everyone above me in search was paying for picks. In the end I gave up and started paying for picks myself. I could comfortably out-pay the people above me in the rankings and very quickly rose to the top of search again. If LL refuse to police gaming then in my opinion I was left with no other option than to beat the gamers at their own game(ing). I was pleased when picks were removed as a search factor as it rendered paying for picks pointless. The same applies with paying for ratings. I have already started tracking and AR'ing those people paying for ratings and will continue to do so. I'll give it a few weeks to see if LL takes action and if they don't then they leave me no other recourse than to start gaming ratings myself. I am happy to play by the rules when the rules are enforced. I am also willing to fight dirty in order to compete and overshadow the gamers. If LL do not take action against those people I have AR'ed then I see no other choice but to out-game them again. LL's history of inaction against gamers leaves us with 2 options. Either lower ourselves to the gamers level to restore an even playing field or to take the moral high ground and reject all forms of gaming to our own determinant. I've spent years living on the moral high ground in SL. It's not an advantageous place to be. It's allot less profitable and there is a distinct smell of crap in the air.

Tara Chester wrote: Sort freebies and cheaper items at the end of "relevance" and "best selling" search results. ty I don't think freebies and anything under L$10 should even be on the marketplace. If LL insist on leaving them there then they should be treated completely separately from all other items and not be listed in standard search results. Given them their own category and search field. Keep them separate.

I've never even heard of this so thanks for posting. I shall reserve comment until after further investigation. I look forward to your 3rd and 4th beefs. I find your posts very interesting.

Argus Collingwood wrote: BTW.. what does AIS stand for? Asset Inventory Server? According to Sea Linden at the last office hour, AIS stands for Agent Inventory Service I remember reading Toy's guess in the transcript which was AIS = Anti Implementable System. That cracked me up.

Charlie Sheen

Persephone Emerald wrote: Porky Gorky said: "Remove peoples ability to vote and they will make their views known in more extreme ways." - I can see it now. In-world rallies with residents burning Lindens in effigy & reporters filming it all for the 6 o'clock news. LOL well I guess that is never beyond the realm of possibility. I was eluding more to people spamming with allot of duplicate JIRA's, derailing user groups/office hours to express their opinions on JIRA's or just allot more moaning and bitching on the forums and blog comments about issues they are passionate about. I guess we will see for ourselves soon enough as the removal of JIRA voting is going to happen.

The only time I ever notice listing enhancements is when I am scrolling through hundreds of them trying to spot my own. When I go on SLM to shop I am oblivious to them. I think nearly 20 years of being online has trained my brain to auto filter all advertising out.

Ah I see. 750 x 66 equals the same aspect ratio as 800 x 70 which is why I didn't notice any resizing I guess. Thanks for proving me wrong :smileytongue:

I did tests on this when I made mine. Biggest Image I could get in was 800 x 70 pixels. So that's how big mine is. Whether or not everyone can see it all I know not. I can see it all and it hasn't been squished or re-sized, so I am happy enough.

Madeliefste Oh wrote: Haha I just noticed you've turned your rank icon into a mouse, or is it a strange looking cat?. Thats great :smileyhappy: