No payment info, no search weight: Put down your SEO bots
by Tateru Nino 
Mar 10th 2008 at 7:00AM
Filed under: Economy, News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds
Sharp-eyed Wildefire Walcott has spotted (and we've spent the last few hours checking and verifying it across a number of accounts) that the profiles of Second Life accounts that have no payment information on file are excluded from the new Linden Lab search system.
More specifically, if they have publish-on-web checked, their profile is available through the web-service, but it certainly appears as if the search system does not index the contents of their profile (for results, search-weighting purposes, relevance or anything else).
If you've been slamming out bots with your store in their picks, or paying people for adding you to their profile picks, or spending money on similar forms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it appears you've been wasting your cash unless the target account has payment information on file with Linden Lab.
At the top of the results (if you match the name exactly) there's a Resident Profile Link but that's not actually the same as being indexed in the search system itself, and having your keywords and picks weighted into the final results.
While this neatly steps on all sorts of ways of using free accounts to subvert the new search system, we have to wonder about the impact on those Second Life business owners who are operating on unverified accounts. It could certainly hamper the ability of people who are just getting started to get the word out about their products and stores.
[via SL Universe]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Cyn said on 8:58AM 3-10-2008
I wonder if the system is going to stop tracking "traffic" from No Payment Info avatars as well?
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Tateru Nino said on 10:47AM 3-10-2008
Depending on the calculation and query load, I suppose it could if LL wanted to do that.
Ari Blackthorne said on 12:30PM 3-10-2008
Woot!
I love it.
A) It helps the search system become fair (re: SEO bots)
B) If anyone doesn't have "payment info on file" or "payment info used" then they aren't serious about it. If they want to become a successful business person in SL, then th need to take their presence in SL more seriously.
I ~like~ this development!
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TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 12:08PM 3-10-2008
won't this fuck up things mroe than it will fix? (it will do stuff like remove sources of income to newbies and harm busyness owners that doesn't have payiment-info'd users as the biggest part of their client base and such....)
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Ari Blackthorne said on 12:32PM 3-10-2008
Here's why this is a GOOD thing:
http://slreview.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/no-payment-info-no-search-woot/
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Ciaran Laval said on 1:36PM 3-11-2008
I take it you've never heard of alts Ari? You know those things people need to get around the ridiculously low 25 group people limit that you tell people to stop moaning about :p
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nika talaj said on 2:13PM 3-10-2008
A pretty substantive discussion of this is on SL's forums, including discovery of a hole in the implementation (or a workaround for this bug, however you view it), as well as better characterization of who shows up and who doesn't:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=245756&page=1&pp=15
You must have payment info on file to access the forum.
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Matthew Dowd said on 3:08PM 3-10-2008
Does this mean that even if you are a payment verified account, but you chose not to be included in search (e.g. you don't want your profile freely viewable on the web outside SL), your picks do not count in the search rankings?
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