Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:46 AM by: Jeska LindenSince the launch of the new search, we’ve had lots of Residents ask for more tips and information on how to improve their search relevance and ranking within the Search All results.
Over the last few months, we’ve compiled some of the best practice tips and guidelines to help improve the relevance and search ranking for your classified ads, parcel listings, object descriptions, profiles, etc.
[EDITED 3/31: After comments from several Resident in the below comments, we have researched how the Google Search Appliance uses "stemming" and included it here. If you're really curious about how this works, read more at Google. The top search results most closely match the search term you type. If you enter "shoes" as your search term, results for "shoes" are listed first, since they match the term entered. Results for "shoe" are not omitted; they are just listed after the results for "shoes," since "shoe" less exactly matches "shoes" as the user entered. If you look at several pages of search results, you will be able to see this. This is a difference between priority, or rank, and relevance.]
Keywords Matter - Think about which words Residents might type to find your listing or products and make sure to include these words in your listing. Include various forms of your keywords and emphasize specificity. For example, if you’re selling swimming pools, include “swimming pools, hot tubs, diving boards, pool supplies, fountains” instead of just “pools”.
Phrases Matter - Phrases count - “pool, swim, board, dive” is not as good as “swimming pool, diving board”. Be specific, if you sell “Olympic sized lane pools” say so!
Grammar Tips - Avoid using “all caps” or non-traditional spellings in your listings. Also, be sure you’ve got the correct spelling!
Search is Smart - There is no need to include both “pool” and “pools” in your listings because our search appliance does stemming and automatically adds -s, -ing, -ly and similar to search terms.
Lying Sucks – When you’re writing keywords for your listings, don’t deceive your potential customers by listing things that have nothing to do with what you actually sell by providing deceptive descriptions in your keyword listings. An example of this would be to use a popular keyword, such as “dancing” to describe your dance-free pool store.
Traffic Matters… kind of – Traffic is a number for each parcel which is based on the amount of Residents who visited, and the time spent on that parcel out of their total time inworld that day. It’s calculated using a complex algorithm. Read more about traffic in the Knowledge Base (KB). Traffic is still used to help determine relevance with the new Search, but not as much as in the old version.
Picks Matter - Having links in other Resident’s Picks tab counts, but creating bots/zombies stuffed with top picks doesn’t help. The more active Residents Picks that reference your parcel/profile the more relevant your listings will be in the overall search.
Branding is Important – If you haven’t already, think about creating a specific brand for your inworld business, including a unique name and/or logo to draw new customers. When thinking about branding, keep in mind that some words are used frequently in the title or description of objects inworld (“object” or “perm”) and try to avoid incorporating these words into your brand. Also, be sure to include your avatar name in your parcel description or classified ad as this may help increase the relevancy (this also helps people find your store if they remember your avatar name, but not your store name!); this is especially important if your parcel/store is owned by a group. Read the Second Life Grid site for more tips on starting a Second Life business.
Advertising Works - Don’t underestimate the power of advertising, even in the virtual world! In addition to the official Second Life Classifieds (which run along side all relevant search results), some Residents have also set up advertising services inworld and you can work directly with them. A simple search returned the following services: OnRez, SLExchange, SLads, Subscribe o Matic, SL Agency. I’m sure there are more - feel free to post your favorite to the comments below!
Classifieds - Classified ads are currently served alongside all relevant search results, sorted by amount paid. We also hope to offer further improvements to the Classified system in the future. Learn more about the Second Life Classifieds system in our KB.
Be Careful when Dividing Land Parcels – As previously reported, changing the boundaries of your land parcel can impact your ranking, remember when joining two parcels, the largest parcel keeps the parcel ID/rankings.
Be Informed - Read more information on the new Search in the KB or watch Torley’s fun search focused Tip of the Week videos: Week 10 and Week 13. A more permanent version of these tips are also located in the KB. Also, be sure to watch this blog for more information and statistics on how the new search is impacting classified sales, inworld businesses and more.
Sharing Time! Do you have other tips and tricks for working with the new search? Add them here as blog comments or send them to search-feedback@lindenlab.com
March 26th, 2008 at 10:52 AM
Search is Smart - There is no need to include both “pool” and “pools” in your listings because our search appliance does stemming and automatically adds -s, -ing, -ly and similar to search terms.
that one is a lie, sorry, but i tested this earlier today and the results arent even remotely similar
March 26th, 2008 at 10:56 AM
Search is Smart - There is no need to include both “pool” and “pools” in your listings because our search appliance does stemming and automatically adds -s, -ing, -ly and similar to search terms.
No it does not. I have tried this out and when I do a search on say “dance pole” it does not return results that contain only ‘dance poles’. I had to explicitly add ‘dance pole’ and ‘dance poles’ in order to get a search return on both. The new search is seriously flawed.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:01 AM
You state here that cloaking sucks. Is it illegal in second life? A lot of businesses suffer from people using their keywords, specifically using their store name as a keyword. Can we have some specifics onthe legality of this within SL?
Also you say traffic is a factor. So when will you be doing soemthing about those who are heavily cheating the traffic system with bots and camping? Only then will traffic applying to search be fair on the rest of us.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:02 AM
free beer seems to help sales
March 26th, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Search is Smart - There is no need to include both “pool” and “pools” in your listings because our search appliance does stemming and automatically adds -s, -ing, -ly and similar to search terms.
Got to agree with the others here, surf and surfing get different results too, I checked. Please stop claiming things that just aren’t true SL, we do check you know.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:03 AM
Google really ripped off LL on this search solution.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:04 AM
OH YES!
Now THIS is a *good* blog entry
Thank you, Jeska!!!
March 26th, 2008 at 11:04 AM
—”Be Careful when Dividing Land Parcels – As previously reported, changing the boundaries of your land parcel can impact your ranking, remember when joining two parcels, the largest parcel keeps the parcel ID/rankings.”—
Is that for certain now that the larger of the two parcels will retain the Parcel ID? ..Or is it still using the ID of the oldest parcel as reported on the 7th?
March 26th, 2008 at 11:13 AM
[...] Tips to Improve Your Search Ranking « Official Second Life Blog Blogged with the Flock Browser [...]
March 26th, 2008 at 11:16 AM
oh & rem - Thanks for the information, we are currently investigating the issue you reporting on stemming and hope to provide more in-depth information shortly.
Since the Google appliance should be supporting stemming, this sounds like an error!
Will report back with my findings.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:26 AM
A suggestion: Since cloaking is so common and is totally dishonest… Linden Lab could really help by making it a Search offense, on pain of removal from search.
There are dishonest people who will use whatever unethical method they find to get people to their place. The only thing that keeps such people in line is enforced ethics (which is what RL “law” is all about).
So declaring cloaking “illegal” might stop that deceitful practice. And only LL can enforce such.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:28 AM
*sigh* I see my impostor is still here.
To make search *really* useful, how about cracking down on keyword spamming so that you don’t get thousands of totally irrelvant results because someone has loaded up their entry with common search terms to get exposure?
Oh, and whilst we’re on about “irrelevant”, any plans to crack down and tidy up the events calendar which is next to useless because of all the duplicates and non-events? Adding a ‘report’ button to each entry so we can at least alert you to bad entries would be a big help.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:29 AM
It’s a nice informative post but please sort out the issue of camping bots having such a huge influence on traffic numbers. It is simply a way of artificially inflating your traffic numbers and bares no relation to actual “REAL” shoppers and popularity.
Not to mention the lag all these bots cause to your servers.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:41 AM
@ Sachi Vixen:
Having camping on your parcel to boost the traffic isn’t cheating. I used to have 6 camping pads at my main shop to create traffic. It worked in the sence that it got me to the top 5 search, but it also cost me close to 15000 L$ a day. So I really can’t see where the cheating comes in.. it’s just another way of advertising.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:44 AM
If we all just admit that both searches are lousy we’d be much happier. The old search used traffic numbers that weren’t based on REAL traffic and the new search has no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Yet, LL always has us scrambling when they go & change something that wasn’t really broken to begin with. I fear the day when LL takes away the old search.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:45 AM
When are the anti camping mob going to join everyone else and actually give newbies Lindens to spend in their shops? thats what camping is about, it feeds the economy and gives people money to spend on items (maybe in your shops too)
Camping is not gaming the search, its part of SL life - without it the whole economy would suffer. Yes the traffic gives you a higher search ranking, but why shouldn’t it? you are giving the community lots of money.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:47 AM
@ Alicia, yes as of 1.19.1 server update, when combining two parcels, the parcel id remains that of the larger parcel. I’ll add that to the earlier post as well!
@ sachi - cloaking is not against the Community Standards at the moment, but it is considered bad practice in the search world. In the future design of classifieds and parcel listings, we hope to limit the keywords to make both cloaking and keyword stuffing less appealing.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:48 AM
Traffic Matters… kind of – Kind of? are you kidding it MATTERS ALOT, thats why a big % of the top stores either use bots or campers, you need to get your facts right.
It is a bloody shame though that both practises give comsumers the wrong impression, oh look 20 camping chairs this store must have good products! NOT! Real soon the seach engine results will be based on how much you can pay for the ad and or how many campers you can afford, non of which give us good search results, in my humble opinion the search engine follows alot of other SL areas, it fails… and that really is a shame because we want SL to succssed becuase, we do love it.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:49 AM
Will there be an added feature to the system to retain the parcel ID for the space specified? What happens if you slice a small section of land from the primary land? What would happen if you divide/join two equal portions of land? I think my search got all messed up when I cut off a foot of land to square up the space, no way to recover the old ID right? No way to find out what the parcel ID is?
Alicia Stella remember to add me to your friends list please. Thanks!
March 26th, 2008 at 11:50 AM
you could kill the bot problem by eliminating traffic completely. we all know what the real story is with all those bots making the product look more popular than it really is. who is fooling who? there has been enough press coverage on this for a long time now so it is pretty obvious there must a reason bots are flourishing. why not make bot use result in a business/parcel being completely excluded from search?
put my name in my parcel description? thats a new one on me. interesting concept.
the main thing you can do is to NOT be involved in any business that is saturated. there is no way to beat out the people paying 500 dollars USD a week in ads. they are going to get top billing no matter if they are deceptive or not. it really shows.
get rid of official LL(TM) endorsements of businesses when you won’t allow anyone else to be recognized. I.e.; drop the endorsement of certain merchants on your website or publish advertising rates and programs so others have the opportunity to get there.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:54 AM
@14:
It’s cheating. The idea of traffic is that it indicates places where avatars go to socialise or buy good products. Paid camping is a complete subversions of that - particularly when the campers are bots.
What about those skyboxes/basements full of zombies? Now there’s an absolute abuse of traffic.
Overall, there has to be a special channel to finger people who abuse the search facility. The big offenders are probably to be found in the top rankings of popular search terms. Big fish in a small pool. Fish in a barrel.
Keyword spamming, cloaking, etc. It’s a no-brainer when you see it.
It’s like an ad-farm. It’s unmistakable.
Anyone abusing search should be wiped from the search index for a period - that period should get exponentially longer for each repeated offence.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:56 AM
What exactly is an “active resident” when it’s all at home? There was a big discussion on the forums regarding whether non payment info on file av’s are being counted when picks are considered.
Traffic, for the love of God eliminate traffic from relevancy. Leave it as as a factor in the old search all.
Classifieds are a waste of time unless you’re paying silly money to get on the first page or two. The column is too small to grab a viewer’s attention, the information is too limited and as there’s no suggestion a high classified ranking adds to relevancy then inworld classifieds start to look like a huge money pit.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:58 AM
The link to the knowledge base articles doesn’t work. I guess the new support portal makeover broke linking.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Advertising Works - Don’t underestimate the power of advertising, even in the virtual world! In addition to the official Second Life Classifieds (which run along side all relevant search results), some Residents have also set up advertising services inworld and you can work directly with them.
Is this an informed tip based on data and research? Most of the researches I have seen doesn’t rank Advertising very effective on the grab bag of results.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:04 PM
@Hjelmen Oh:
Yes, camping may in some ways help the land owner who hosts the campers, but it does a real disservice to other land owners in the sim. Why should we all be driven to private islands to enjoy the benefits that should be a “given” in SL–i.e., access to one’s own land. Case in point: My partner and I own most of a new sim, with the remaining three 4K parcels occupied by a new dance club that advertises vigorously and uses camping chairs. Lag is common, and we are sometimes kept from entering the sim due to overcrowding. And we had to put up ban lines to keep the overflow off our own property. Wish we had known the club was to be built when bought in–that was misrepresented to us, but that’s life (SL). Our land is strictly a residential playground for us, and it’s a good thing, as we would not otherwise be able to compete with this server hog. **Camping needs to go!**
March 26th, 2008 at 12:07 PM
I have to agree with o.h. and Ravanne: stemming does not work at all. For example, “texture” and “textures” give very different results, and what common hits I found are entirely due to the owner’s foresight in using both keywords.
Moreover there is a somewhat similar phenomenon with incomplete keywords, especially when used in combination: “bamboo textur” will find just ONE hit, whereas “bamboo textures” will find several hundred. This may not seem critical in this example, but when searching on longer keywords and stem combinations such as “dance” and “dancing” it would save considerable time to be able to search only on the first few letters of a keyword–a feature I clearly remember from the old Search system, so it *can* be done.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:08 PM
#20 actually to get on the bottom of the top classified list its now well over $800 u.s. a week and over $1,1000 a week for #1, LL needs to put more on the first page as this is getting crazy if 20 where displayed then maybe $500 bucks could be possible.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:10 PM
I’m off to Broccoli’s for some free beer. I hope they dont sell motorbikes or I might die on the way home.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:10 PM
There is so much of this cloaking that searches are worse than useless, wouldnt these idiots prefer a customer to buy something rather than gain a little fake traffic.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:12 PM
strange part is I have never used classidieds, new search or looked at ads since they came out and it hasnt even deserved a second glance. I still am capable using the old way and can find whatever I want or need. So to me its simply another waste of time. Completely irrelevant.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:14 PM
RE: picks. The use of picks in ranking is borked by these two facts:
1. a huge number of residents use picks for “tribute” posts about their friends, and 2. The location of that pick depends on where they were when they typed it. Thus, a popular garden can show up in a search for “eyes” because a lot of people made reference to their partners’ lovely eyes. See SVC-1704.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:21 PM
If only the search would work correctly with Unicode characters. A search for “Test” and “test” will deliver the same results, a search for the German “Überraschung” (correct word) however will give different reults than for “überraschung” (wrong case, but typical - lazy - search query).
Another thing: Businesses not large enough to buy a parcel of their own (like most services for example) are at a disadvantage.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:26 PM
NPIOF accounts that are real active accounts are totally excluded from search. So please… don’t label all NPIOF as bots. We can easily ask someone to add a pick and then search for them in a week and see they are non existent. So exactly what makes a NPIOF account “active”? your denying thousands, if not millions, of residents a voice in what is popular.
Sorry. next?
March 26th, 2008 at 12:27 PM
Please remove any traffic metric as a factor in ordering results, both in New Search and in Places–and Popular Places is now completely useless, so it may as well be removed altogether. At this point, the *only* way for traffic to affect a business’s search results is to “game” it with bots; regular camping just can’t compete. Moreover, the world has simply outgrown traffic as a useful metric, even if it weren’t gamed to meaninglessness. Now it simply indicates which places to avoid, either because the lag is too intense, or the parcel owner is too invested in “search optimization” with fake traffic to produce anything of any possible interest.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:28 PM
Thanks for the post, Jeska; the suggestion to include one’s avatar name in your parcel description is a new one for me. I do have to agree with those who complain about bot zombie pits and skyboxes: these are abusive and pointless, with none of the newbie-encouraging upsides that camping can have. Those who use them should be penalized. If you simply issued a call to have them reported, you’d generate a quick list from aggrieved SL businesspeople. . .
March 26th, 2008 at 12:31 PM
wait so you announced about the trademark issues with your logo and use of “Secondlife” “SL” and ect, yet 3 of the 5 advertising suppliers you mentioned has “SL” in the name?
wut?
March 26th, 2008 at 12:37 PM
Given the raging extremist tenor of some of the comments on traffic here, let me inject some moderation: yes I have camped in the past and I still occasionally camp, at present mostly because it’s just about the only thing I can do when SL grinds along at five freaking frames per minute (all you well-meaning people who are about to give me advice on lag control: yes I have my draw distance dialed down to 64, particles switched off, and all that stuff, it’s still not enough).
The point is, honest campers (yes there are some of us) hate bots and zombies, probably more passionately than most complainers here, because in addition to one rl person taking up 300 spots that could be used by 299 *other* people, they are giving honest campers a bad name. By honest camper I mean someone who does not use more than one account at the same time to camp, who does not use any resit devices to hog camp chairs, and who tries not to be afk more than necessary (going to the bathroom is fine, parking your av on a dance pad for 2 weeks while going on a cruise to the Seychelles is not).
So I do agree that bots and other camping abuses need to be curtailed somehow, but I do not agree that camping should be banned altogether. I am with David Free on this one: there should be some way to give a little boost to people who are new to SL–or, for that matter (and I am surprised that this is not mentioned more often, because there are a *lot* of them) people who have been in SL for a while but have fallen on hard times and need something to tide them over. Once upon a time, I was worth a quarter million L$. Ginko ate it (no told-you-sos *now* please, I was *not* told when it mattered). Without camping to tide me over the resulting penury, I don’t know what I would have done.
There is a lot more I could say about this, but I want to give others a chance (which in a way is what this is all about) so let me just say this: NO all-or-nothing solution to the traffic question is going to be satisfactory. We need to find a middle ground where abuses are curtailed without ruining the chances of honest but inexperienced or unlucky residents to build up seed money to make it in SL.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:38 PM
@Darien - sorry the links should work now!
March 26th, 2008 at 12:45 PM
#20, You are aware that when searching for something, using the ads, you usually restrain your search by using keyword (ie : sport for example) and specific category.
You can be in 1st page with only 50L$.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:54 PM
Re: Stemming, I found further documentation about how stemming works with the search (from this google blog)
The Google Search Appliances include a query expansion feature which performs the same function as stemming, but just does it smarter. Anybody can do things like taking “park” and make it “parks” — but in a lot of cases, we’ve seen that unintelligent stemming actually will make results worse. Drawing off of the intelligence derived from billions of queries, we know that a good solution will detect context, and expand a query like “city park” to also include “public park” but not “city parking.” So, whether you want to call what the appliance does “smart stemming” or “Context Sensitive Query Expansion” (the latter being what our marketing team chose) it’s a core feature of our product.
Which means it’s a bit more complicated than the example above, my apologies! We’re doing further research and will update the tips asap.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:00 PM
@36: While there are still businesses offering camping, the problem is that “real” campers just aren’t nearly as efficient as bots at generating traffic. And the cost of paying the campers is the least of it. Rather, compared to bots, “real” campers are *much* laggier: they have to download each others’ textures, anims, sounds, etc., their numbers are hard to control as sim performance varies, and they do all sorts of laggy things like sort Inventory or change clothes–so a business simply can’t afford the lag from enough campers to compete with bots. And with trafficbots so easy to use now, I’m afraid camping is obsolete, whether or not traffic remains a metric relevant to Search results.
That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be more opportunities for new residents to earn L$s. But the argument that this justifies the traffic metric through the relatively ineffective means of camping is the tail trying to wag a now missing dog.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:07 PM
#38 the cheapest classified ad on page 1 of the word “sport” for the category places is 20000.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:08 PM
I still use the old search system, because it’s much more difficult to find what you want with the new search.
It was much easier to drive traffic to your parcels before the new search system, even without campers/bots. I could easily find the (relevant) keywords that wasn’t spammed by parcel owners with bots.
Traffic to my parcels took a serious dive when the new search system was implemented, and camping devices are still a major key in getting a top placement.
Another thing is, the Top Picks are also being gamed. Quite a few are paying people to include their parcels in the top picks, so now the picks are also becoming irrelevant.
And Classifieds are not getting nearly the same amount of traffic as it used to. The only positive effect here is, that now it’s cheaper to advertise in the Classifieds, because they are not as effective anymore, so ppl are not spending as much on them, at least not in my line of business.
The new system sucks, it’s worse than the old search system!
March 26th, 2008 at 1:09 PM
@5 you could do a little less flaming of Jeska and stick to the facts. There was no need to accuse Jeska of posting falsehoods when it was simply a matter of semantics. In general you get a better response to your issues if you post them in a polite way. Also, did anyone who found an issue with the stemming file a ticket?
March 26th, 2008 at 1:09 PM
what if Linden Lab (TM) took it upon themselves to take a stand against internet spam operations using Second Life (R) as a way to perpetuate email spam fraud and made it a TOS violation to use Second Life(R) as a platform for internet spam operations?
That would take a couple of heavy hitters off the top of the list eh?
March 26th, 2008 at 1:19 PM
I just encountered this. (I suppose I will be filing an AR)
Places using the name of Other peoples Businesses in SL as a key word.
Any Linden care to comment on this dirty tactic.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:20 PM
I have a shop, and removed a certain product from my resell side. This person was so upset, they took my name and added it to their search keywords and now appear before me in search of my own shop name. This is scandelous and SL has done nothing about it. One more show of favoritism on the Grid… if i was a furry I wouldnt be treated as such. Considering dating an animal so I get treated better by LL.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:21 PM
LL: Just end traffic now. It’s a dead horse, let it rot. Take some time to really think it through again and then, only if you’ve really got it game-proof, quietly re-instate some ranking mechanism that measures real traffic (but don’t let people know how it works) the way Google stays on top of the search game is they keep it difficult to game the results and change things up when people figure it out.
I’ve noticed several replies to other inquiries here by Jeska, but none regarding traffic, which is one of the most discussed items here.
Face it, traffic is dead as a metric that is useful to the user population and at this point is simply a computational drain on the entire system that could be taken away. It’s a horse with 3 broken legs and internal bleeding, you’re simply prolonging everyone’s misery if you let it stick around. It’s been useless for years now.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:30 PM
Guys,
At least recognize the improvements and efforts being made here. Although the new search is not top nothc just yet, it is far better than the old one. Granted it will take some time to get used to the new tips and tricks to get back up to parr, but it’s not that bad.
I do agree with traffic having any influence on parcel listing. It should just apply to perhaps clubs and hangouts. I actually sell MORE on days I have LESS traffic, so my business having a lot of visitors has no impact on my sales really. I do want to know if a club is popular though, cause I don’t want to end up in an empty place.
Also agree calssifieds is getting out of hand with the high prices. Good for those who can afford it, bad to those who cannot. I will patiently wait for the new classifieds before going on.
LL, we do bitch and moan a lot, but I am sure we can all agree that you are doing your best to give us an improved experience. Keep up the good work.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:37 PM
Tip: Parcels smaller than 144 sq.m. are not included in the new search!
@47: Dropping the traffic metric would be a bad idea. It’s a good way to measure how well you advertising is doing. Dropping traffic as a search ranking criterium is another matter, but isn’t really necessary. You just have to be smart with keywords, to beat the bots.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:55 PM
Traffic SHOULDN’T matter - unless you plan to do something about fraudulent traffic generated by bots.
March 26th, 2008 at 1:57 PM
Another glitch in the new all search is that for some parcels only the keywords in the parcel name are picked up, while for others description & name of parcel are picked up. Already raised a ticket once and learned it shouldn´t be picking up the description. While i don´t understand why that is supposed to be like that, i know for certain it´s not working and putting different people into advantage/disadvantage over others
Also the new search is a desaster when your sim was down for a while, because you will be off search for the offtime, just a few hours later. Very unpleasant side effect
Classifieds are not picked up at all sometimes, not seen a theme there just seems to happen occasionally and also agree to lots of comments from others, they simply lost any meaning if you cannot effort to be in the top paid 8.
As to picks…the way they are handled doesn´t make sense…As mentioned above, the parcel description is not supposed to be picked up by the all search. Now, for the parcels where this works, i don´t find my specific shop in the all search, but i do find my shop in various peoples picks. Why was this desired?
And just a quick word to you Jeska, while it´s good to educate people on the new search, you´re just softly scratching the surface and also your responses here show, that you are not the expert per se on the new search…No offense btw
It´s a long way until this system is fully mature
March 26th, 2008 at 2:00 PM
“we hope to limit the keywords to make both cloaking and keyword stuffing less appealing.” Jeska Linden
You’re going to shorten the space for parcel descriptions? Please say that isn’t so. There’s barely enough room to make a coherent description of a place as it is. You have to use keywords because there’s not enough room to describe your store using keywords. You have to choose one or the other.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:05 PM
nika talaj Says:
March 26th, 2008 at 12:14 PM
RE: picks. The use of picks in ranking is borked by these two facts:
1. a huge number of residents use picks for “tribute” posts about their friends, and 2. The location of that pick depends on where they were when they typed it. Thus, a popular garden can show up in a search for “eyes” because a lot of people made reference to their partners’ lovely eyes. See SVC-1704.
You hit the nail on the head Nika. I would guess 80% of the picks are this way. Perhaps making it so you can’t change the picture or name of the spot would help. Only the ad picture, name of the business & one line comment should be allowed. “Tributes” should only be in your personal area anyway. Join or start a tribute group, make a web page or write a book to pass out if you feel it necessary to advertise your friends & loved ones. True friends don’t need to be advertised to the world in my opinion. We don’t make ads in the newspaper in RL, why are you doing it here really? Save it for people who really care and use the area for what it is intended ….. PICKS
March 26th, 2008 at 2:25 PM
Jeska Linden Says: March 26th, 2008 at 12:54 PM
Which means it’s a bit more complicated than the example above, my apologies! We’re doing further research and will update the tips asap.
Hi Jeska,
another example on the stemming issue: with the word “statue” in the search box, my store sometimes doesn’t show for pages and pages and a few times I haven’t found it at all. But if I put in the word “statues” I come up 2nd or 3rd on the 1st page everytime.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:32 PM
Simple solution to the whole “add every word in the dictionary for Keyword” debacle. Have two text blocks instead of one. The top one is the existing text field and can have anything in it at all. The bottom one is Keywords field and the business owner puts in their keywords there - at a cost of 25L per keyword over 15 (the first 15 keywords are included in the price of the ad) per week. People then have two search fields to use - anything goes or specific searchwords.
And all of you who cry that your mall/club/whatever needs more than 15 keywords — the current anything goes method is the reason I cannot find and shop at your store in the first place.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:32 PM
Let’s be clear, there is a big difference between regular camping and “traffic bots” that infest most popular places. These are landowner run bots who are usually not camping or earning lindens at all. They are often hidden from view or difficult to get to. They are simply there to ‘game’ the system at the expense of all other honest landowners and their renters. Therefore ‘time spent in sim’ statistics will be biased towards these static and lifeless colony’s of parasitic traffic bots.
Make it one unique traffic count per visitor per 24hrs and the bot farms become instantly irrelevant.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:36 PM
Camping Bots are a serious issue, I agree. However, it is far more appealing as a Customer to purchase items from a Retailer that does not spice up their numbers with camping, thus giving them more accurate traffic. If I arrive at a location that is obviously a ghost town with bots up in a skybox somewhere, I can tell. The lag and mysterious green little dots gives it away. It is a complete turn off and I usually leave as soon as I identify the reason for the horrendous lag. If you stand at the TP point, you will notice most people will do the same exact thing… TP right out. If you consider wasting your money on camping bots to put your name at the top of a list, also consider if it is really helping you in the way it is supposed to, with sales. At one point, there was a very creative camping idea out there. I believe it was a bug stomper, where you actually had to run your avatar over the bugs and would receive $L according to how many bugs you stomped. Although I’m sure someone has already found a way to bot this kind of camping as well, I thought the idea was helping towards a solution. This is the kind of camping that LL should be encouraging if they intend to stick behind their helping out newbies and spurring the SL Economy. A camping that involves actual active participants and not just one person on 300 plus alts milking the system.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:38 PM
I forgot to add my opinion about picks as a search indicator. I personally don’t see the relevance of someone having you in their picks increasing your place in “search” if that search is for a particular product.
I have nothing against campers, in fact I camped to make enough in world money to buy hair and things my first few months in game. Camper bots to increase traffic are irritating, take up bandwidth, although I suppose they help your 60K people online numbers, but I also would take traffic out of search.
I’d rather have “search” be a relevancy search rather than a popularity contest.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:39 PM
nice post. thanks for sharing your traffic tips
March 26th, 2008 at 2:42 PM
“In the future design of classifieds and parcel listings, we hope to limit the keywords to make both cloaking and keyword stuffing less appealing.”
Why??
If I sell “elephants, hippopatumuses and rhinoceroses” (42), I’ll be penalized because I don’t sell “dogs, cats and fish” (20)? That person would get 22 extra characters verses me. And that’s more than enough for them to add “puppies and kittens” to their description.
March 26th, 2008 at 2:44 PM
@56
You do realize that all the item pictures also cause tremendous lag,
probably more then any campers them selves(unless there is a lot of them).
So i guess you also like to avoid stores with a lot of choices too,
or any place with decent pictures of the items so you can tell what your buying.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:07 PM
Jeska, Since you are mentioning:
“Be Careful when Dividing Land Parcels – As previously reported, changing the boundaries of your land parcel can impact your ranking, remember when joining two parcels, the largest parcel keeps the parcel ID/rankings.”
Be aware that the knowledge base article ID 4417 entitled “How do I join & split land?” is in fact the old one and is still inaccurate because no one has bothered to complete that task nor answering questions as to how the function works when dividing them (vs. joining them), which is what the title implies.
Concierge has been reminded twice of such (3/12/2008 12:30 PM PDT & 3/17/2008 2:08 PM PDT) and yet nothing has been corrected/completed.
I see that Stephany Linden updated the Search Ranking Update post with [UPDATE - Mar 26] As of the 1.19.1 server update, the larger of the two parcels selected keeps the parcel ID.
Yet the rest and all related questions seem being ignored to this day after 3 weeks.
So FYI you are referring to misleading and/or incomplete information Jeska…
Can you PLEASE have this completed? sigh
March 26th, 2008 at 3:12 PM
Bots are awesome. There are better uses for them than just pumping traffic numbers - they’re great for automating tasks that only avatars can do (e.g. group invites), or for displaying wearable products. If people really want to whine about traffic numbers, then use use new search.
If they lag you, then don’t go where they’re used, no need to be a pill about it.
Domo arigato, SL roboto!
March 26th, 2008 at 3:19 PM
@Hu
Bots are awesome? how so when they are used to game a parcel’s search ranking that means that parcel owner makes RL money from placing their own avatars on it?
New search uses traffic so it applies to that too.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:27 PM
“…some Residents have also set up advertising services inworld and you can work directly with them.”
Good Lord, PLEASE don’t tell me that you’re now advocating the use of the 16 sq.m. lot advertising networks! Everyone I know avoids the businesses they see on the billboards because they’re such a nuisance.
Whatever you do to change the search ranking, people are going to find a way to game it. That’s just how it’s gonna be. Witness the explosion of “picks camping.” The best you can do is hit on a method that will cause the least negative side effects to the community - getting rid of traffic counts would eliminate the extra lag associated with campers and bots, for example.
I like the idea of giving people a fixed number of words to use for keywords instead of a character limit. Do you recommend separating keywords with commas in order to make the phrases more searchable, or will two words in a row regardless of the punctuation have the same effect?
March 26th, 2008 at 3:30 PM
Hu: you don’t need 30 bots sitting in a skybox lagging everyone on a sim just to handle group invites.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:35 PM
Something that I always thought that would be a good idea (to help with things such as ‘cloaking’
is if we could actually rate *certain* search results, such as classifieds/event listings, and filter our results by rating. I can see how some might abuse a feature like this, but, I think its something worth thinking about.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:55 PM
What is not emphasized clearly enough is this: PICKS ARE THE STRONGEST INFLUENCE IN RANKINGS FOR ANY GIVEN KEYWORD.
Each pick by a resident other than your alts is one incoming link to the webpage built for your parcel. The more incoming links you have with the same keyword, the better it is. This is also why changing the pick text is bad - the parcel will appear in search results that are completely irrelevant, and LL is complicit in the cloaking. Please look at the SVC-1704 Jira and do something about it. There are far too many irrelevant picks that are clogging up the search results.
Traffic, however, can only give you a maximum of 12 incoming links, based on the popular places pages, and is largely not worth it. If you have traffic score over 150 or so, you’ve already got I think 3 of the maximum 12 links. The amount of lag induced by bot farms is not worth the 11th or 12th link. Make better stuff for sale!
March 26th, 2008 at 4:17 PM
@ Bryon - I will pass along the request to update the out of date Knowledge Base article with the most current information. Apologies for any inconvenience that may have caused, keeping all of the documentation up to date is a marathon, not a sprint
As far as the future of land joining, we hope to add a more visible display of the parcel id during parcel joining so that you are able to tell what is happening. There are no further changes planned at this time to land joining.
@ nika & JB - Agreed! We’re very much aware that Picks are often used for “Tributes” which have nothing to do with a particular location or place and have everything to do with a person. I’d love to see a “My Friends” space incorporated into future versions of the profile to help allow people to both show off their favorite friends and locations.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:30 PM
RE: Traffic, camping bots, zombies and other unique methods of increasing the visibility of your parcel.
I’m not ignoring the questions, I just don’t have a good solution to present here and this blog post is not specifically addressing the future of these complex issues. I appreciate the passion that these topics raise and know that we are listening.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:33 PM
Jeska (and also JB) - we’re supposed to be creative types (love that) which is why - yes you will find tribute entries in picks. Give us an alternative and we will use it. if not we run with the tools we have.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:33 PM
Well when we look at new locations for vendors the first thing we check is bots and campers they immediately negate the location for our vendors.
There is no sense using a site that generates traffic in the tens of thousands by camping or bots, they buy nothing just use server time.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:52 PM
Thank you Jeska,
On “Advertising Works” here is one more:
Advertising services in world are also available on the SLearth Network
PS: SLearth Advertising is not using, nor supporting or advocating the use of the 16 sq.m. lot for advertising networks.
March 26th, 2008 at 5:33 PM
#43
I agree, this new search all but killed off my ’skate and date’ skate park. IDK what exactly was the reason but as soon as this came out, numbers started dropping. I went from 4500 to double digit traffic over a month’s time with nothing changing about how it was run. Then we were forced to go from 3 fun events a week to 1 and a handful of people at most find it. The fact they do nothing about people spamming the event calender doesn’t help.
Not sure if them removing events from search and replacing them with the paid classifieds is what did it? I wish I could generate enough USD with an ice skating park (that is free for people to use and used to attract a lot of new residents) to pay enough classified money for people to find me, but I can’t. I had to fire 2 employees and lost most of my income (tips and trick skate sales). Good thing I can build or I’d be broke from this. I have a feeling I’m not the only place, besides the money island camperbot places or people about to afford hundreds od USD for ads that has gone under from this new search fiasco
March 26th, 2008 at 6:05 PM
LL, if you check your issue tracker, all these flaws in the search are already listed there, and many more not mentioned. I think fixing the bugs would help people more than this blog.
March 26th, 2008 at 6:40 PM
You know Jeska, i did notice this the other day while searching. I kept wondering why it was giving me things that i didnt ask for. It is not a good way to run a search engine, its like search engine for dummies. I know what I’m looking for. I dont need the system to guess for me. Maybe if you took that out i could find something right away. lol
March 26th, 2008 at 6:55 PM
1. There seems to be a misconception about stemming. I haven’t checked if stemming is actually working, but even if it is working, you will *not* get the same results back for ’swimming pool’ and ’swimming pools’. The reason is that a page containing ’swimming pool’ matches the searchterm ’swimming pool’ better than a page that contains ’swimming pools’, and vice versa. What stemming means is that both pages will be included in the results set. The set is sorted according to relevancy, and the matching phrase is the most relevant of the two.
2. Jeska is mistaken about cloaking. Cloaking in the search engine world means something completely different to what Jeska described.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:07 PM
Recently we purchased our neighbours land and we were hit with a bug and we were wiped from search.
This then rendered all the picks that had been created useless (club established 1year) and we had to ask everyone to come in and redo.
We do no beleive in camping, we want people to walk into a ‘living’ club and for our vendors to have genuine customers, but as we sit and watch our traffic plummet helplessly I can totally understand the temptation.
I apprecaite keyword play a huge factor in the search, but none of ours have changed so why are we pages and pages away from our origional position prior to the merger….I beleive that the length of time you have been established on that land plays a significant part …if its …no one will ever move again
March 26th, 2008 at 7:07 PM
jira SVC-1823
Classifieds weekly rate must go. Charge for actual Click-through.
In order to improve SL classified search.
In order to not charge residents when changes to the classified process fail.
Industry standard search engine advertisement fee is based on actual click through. For example, Google allows the advertiser to set how much is paid per keyword. If no one clicks on the ad, there is no charge. The weekly classifieds rate was a billing standard used by print newspapers. All internet search engines charge per click through.
This proposal is for one new component feature and one related new policy:
1) Detail advertisement payment box to individual keyword fields
2) Change fee from prepaid week to Click Through instance.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:11 PM
but is the search smart enough to tell that “Furry” and “Furries” are related? is it smart enough to connect “jetpack” and “jet pack”?
And why in the world would you make your search CASE SENSITIVE?
March 26th, 2008 at 7:32 PM
Smart search?I just searched for Mall,no camping and got pages of mall,with camping on every hit i bothered to browse.
There are reasons its allowed,camping means online stats look good,Strangley total residents removed from main page and residents logged in in last month etc.Now if you click almost any region on the map that has a lot of avatars on there and teleport there 3 out of 4 will be full of campers.
I would expect that total residents probably are around 5 million now but if only 300,000 residents were logged on in a month would not be so attractive to buisnesses looking to come in to sl?or am i being cynical?
So will search ever be relivant if this is how things really work?.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:32 PM
#12 (Broccoli’s post) ~ Speaking of the Events page: Please fix the online events page’s Category popup. It hasn’t worked for almost 3 weeks. (At least, not on either of my Macs running Safari or Firefox and not on a friend’s Windows machine.)
March 26th, 2008 at 7:38 PM
Well it turns out we have 13 million residents and 1 and a quater million log ins in last month,slightly less than 10%
March 26th, 2008 at 7:47 PM
@80 Phil,
Cloaking is indeed somewhat mis-characterized here. However, you could argue that the idea conveyed by Jeska is not to misrepresent a product by its object name or description. While it’s not really cloaking, the object data could present a different information to the search engine from what the user might see in world on the product texture and in the notecard given by the box. Let’s call it SLoaking™!. SLoaking sucks.
March 26th, 2008 at 8:05 PM
@85 Bryon
LOL. Ok. SLoaking it is
March 26th, 2008 at 8:16 PM
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:29 PM
“SLoaking” would actually be a violation of the new usage policy, since you’re making up a new word using the trademarked “SL”.
What is up with the advertisers plugging their services in the blog comments??? That’s inappropriate - the Linden blog is not intended to be free advertising for you.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:27 AM
Sacha said this near the start - when will bots be able to be eradiacted from SL?
Cloaking should be a ToS violation.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:01 AM
@79
You hit the nail on the head! Every time you create a new parcel or buy an new Island, it puts your search ranking back to square one. It will take you weeks or months or years to build up the picks, keywords and popularity again.
What LL have effectively done (once people realise this) is stopped the “new” land market. People will just want to buy old parcels for their ranking. Parcels have a unique key so it does not matter who the owner is, that key is what is related to the new search. So for example I could buy a parcel completely unrelated to my business that has a search rank 1, change the name of the parcel to my business and then within 24 - 48 hours, I will be search rank number 1.
Its now completely irrelevant to how businesses and land owners are doing, its all linked to the parcel key and what happened on the land prior to owning it!
So you are absolutely right, the older and more established businesses are top of the search because of their length of service in SL and the number of people that over time that have added them to their picks.
Thats why new businesses and land owners are struggling.