Search. Enough is enough?

Today again, I found out that all our locations have fallen significantly in the search results. Obviously, another update in the GSA ran live recently, resulting in all the previous SEO work being worthless or even counter productive. Now, I do understand that all the systems in use evolve and change during time and I also think that the merchant's ability to adapt to the changing environment is one of the greatest advantages. But seriously, the thing is getting a bit out of control lately.

Since April, showing or not showing in the search has been one of the biggest concerns of any business in SL. Constant changes forced the owners to spend countless hours tweaking the parcel description and the description of objects on it. In my case, it's well over 600 records to be tweaked and updated. Doing it for the first time is an adventure, the second time is a must, but third such round is really ridiculous waste of the time and resources.

First, all our products had self-explanatory and clear descriptions and everything worked fine. After the "great maturity checkboxes bug" appeared, it was a bit trickier, but IF the search found us at all, we were ranking on the top. Then the picks were removed from the ranking process and more weight was put on the description of the objects on parcel. Fine, although all the descriptions remained very 'descriptive', I added the keywords in them (still obeying the english grammar rules and keeping the descriptions easy to read). Our locations with nice SEO-wise descriptions were scoring high again (yes, among records like "airport airport airport"). For a month maybe. Now, everything is different again, it seems that you can get the top position for any keyword with just an empty parcel with no description whtsoever, no objects in search and NO SEO at all. The good and readable descriptions that are advised by the Lab seem to actually LOWER your ranking. I understand the need to filter the crap out of the search, but so far, the efforts mostly meant just work for the honest merchants and some stellar results for biab freebie places.

So why is the economy not growing? In my opinion it's not the viewer wars, and neither it's the horrible first hour experience that would be the most important factor. In my opinion, it's the common user's inability to find good quality content in SL. Why would you spend time inworld on the crappy places search takes you to? Why would anyone buy L$ to purchase the worthless junk? One would think that this is the most pressing matter in the Lab, rather than introducing Display Names and other problematic shinies.


I've always supported the steps the Lab has been taking to improve the user experience in SL. I was very happy with the Viewer 2.0 introduction, our whole team has been working hard on a product based on the SharedMedia features... Only to find out that a couple of months later the product is still not ripe for a release - with just about 10% of users able to see the web on prim, it would be a fail, obviously. Lost time, lost efforts, lost money.

The new Marketplace seemed like a wonderful idea in the begining, and I still think it's a good move. However the style in which the transition is being made is totally repelling. The new system doesn't work right, most merchants didn't bother to update their listings on this BETA as the ridiculous amount of work could easily render fruitless with yet another migration wave. And yet we see the Marketplace BETA live, with access to live funds, with possibility to sell and a Big button on xStreet diverting customers to the New Marketplace. This period of two, not fully synchronized systems, employed at the same time, the confusion around them and the bugs of the premature BETA are really damaging the businesses and I'm starting to feel like a laboratory rat that's being experimented on without the painkillers.

How can anyone focus on creating new cool content when most of the time needs to be spent on simply staying visible? How can you compete by quality, when you're not to be found? Why should I pay tiers for 4 sims, and pack them with fun content (and fun content it is, 3 of our locations got featured in the Destination Guide), when I'm run over by an empty 512m parcel? I'm increasingly confused and fed up - also a reason for limited releases under our brands lately. Should we waste more energy or make the decisive move?