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Question about search/tag ranking after a game came out of quarantine (Ticket #381030)

A topic by GoonerUnleashed created 39 days ago Views: 559 Replies: 13

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Hello,

I'm looking for some clarification about how itch.io's search and tag ranking works, because I'm seeing behavior that I can't explain.

My game: https://goonerunleashed.itch.io/yes-i-am-a-furry

The game was quarantined for review and came out of quarantine around June 4th. Since then, I've noticed two things:

My weekly impressions dropped dramatically (from roughly 600k/week before to around 20–30k/week now).
More importantly, my game now appears extremely low in tag browsing and search results.

The game is:

marked as Adult
completely free (no donations)
updated every 2-3 weeks
accompanied by regular devlogs
currently has 278 ratings with an average score of 4.46/5

The strange part is that the game appears to be indexed correctly, but it can be found if you know the exact title and its ranking seems unusually low.

For example:

when browsing relevant tags, my game is almost always near the bottom of the results
when searching for the title, I have to type at least "yes i a" before it appears, and even then it shows around 24th place behind many unrelated games.

I'm not asking for my game to be manually promoted or ranked higher. I'm simply trying to understand whether this behavior is expected after a game comes out of quarantine, or if there might be something affecting how my project is ranked.

I opened a support ticket about a month ago (#381030) but haven't received a response yet, so I thought I'd ask here in case someone can explain how the ranking system works or whether this is something that staff should look into.

Has anyone experienced something similar after being re-indexed?

Thank you.

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No Time To PlayModerator39 days ago

I’ve let our admins know about your ticket, but itch.io doesn’t guarantee search ranking or visibility for any game. Advertising is your responsibility.

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GoonerUnleashed39 days ago

Thank you very much for forwarding my ticket to the admins, I really appreciate your help.

I completely agree that advertising and bringing players to the game is my responsibility, and that's what I've been doing.

What confuses me is that the game's position in search and tag browsing doesn't seem to react even when it receives a significant amount of new traffic and engagement.

For example, a few days ago one of TikTok videos unexpectedly went viral and the game received almost 20,000 views in a single day (compared to the usual ~3,000). However, despite that spike, I couldn't observe any change in its position in search or tag listings, not even by a single position.

I'm not asking for preferential treatment or guaranteed visibility. I'm just trying to understand whether this behavior is expected, or if there's some other factor that determines search ranking that I'm overlooking.

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No Time To PlayModerator38 days ago

This is what determines ranking in searches: /t/719515/how-does-itchio-sort-games-by-these-criteria-popular-newpopular-top-rated-top-sellers-most-recent and the key takeaway is that it’s not so simple. Please, please focus on your game and audience instead of rankings.

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GoonerUnleashed31 days ago

Thank you again for the reply and for passing my ticket along.

I understand that itch.io does not guarantee any particular search ranking, and I also understand that the ranking system is complicated. However, I feel like my actual concern may have been misunderstood a little.

I'm not asking why my game isn't performing better, or why it isn't ranked near the top. I'm concerned because after the game came out of quarantine, its position in tag browsing changed very drastically and has stayed that way ever since.

If possible, could you please take another look at my replies further up in this thread, especially the ones under redonihunter's reply? I posted screenshots there showing what I'm talking about.

The main issue is:

My game receives almost no traffic from itch.io tag browsing.
Regardless of which relevant tags I use, the game consistently appears at or extremely close to the bottom of the results.
Before quarantine, it was around the top 50 under the furry tag. After quarantine, it dropped close to the bottom among 1000+ projects.
This change happened directly after the quarantine period.
Since then, I've released major updates, regularly published devlogs, continued improving the game's page, and continued receiving consistent traffic from Google, Yandex, social media, and other external sources.
Despite all of that, its position in tag browsing appears to have barely changed at all.

So when I'm told to focus on my game and audience instead of rankings, I'm a little confused, because that is exactly what I've been doing. The game is still receiving players from outside itch.io. What I'm trying to understand is why itch.io's own tag discovery appears to treat the project so differently since quarantine.

I don't expect updates, ratings, or external traffic to automatically put my game at the top, and I'm not asking for preferential treatment. But when an actively maintained project consistently appears below projects with only a handful of ratings and no updates for years, across essentially every relevant tag I check, I think it's reasonable for me to wonder whether something may still be affecting the project's discoverability after quarantine.

It has now also been about 36 days since I sent support ticket #381030, and about 7 days since your last reply here. I completely understand that support may be busy, but I would really appreciate it if someone could confirm whether the project has actually been checked for any indexing, ranking, or post-quarantine issue.

I'm mainly looking for confirmation that there isn't some technical limitation or flag still affecting the game. If everything has been checked and this is genuinely expected behavior, that's completely fine. I would just like to know that for certain.

Thank you again for your help and for taking the time to read this.

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redonihunter31 days ago (1 edit)

Oh, this is a bug. Combine adult, furry and horror and your game is on bottom of those 100 games, even below two games that do not even have a cover image.

But this is community message board. Not Itch tech support. Unless an admin drops by, no one here (including the mod) can say anything concrete about this. We can only give opinion and tell you to write to support.

And I can tell that this is not the first time I have seen such a thread where a (popular) game got sorted last

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GoonerUnleashed31 days ago

Thank you for replying, I feel better knowing that this is a bug.

But what should I do if I've send a request to the support and waiting for more than one month for it's response?

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redonihunter30 days ago

Write again with a new mail and point out, that the popular sorting algorithm still did not recover, whatever affected your game. Because that is what should have happened after a week or so. Even if you missed out completely on some days or weeks of popularity metric, it should have recalculated at a higher place by now.

And do not focus on asking questions. Support usually does not answer questions, according to lots of threads here.

The two games without cover I mentioned, they did change position. So a recalculation happened. But your game is still on bottom of adult furry horror.

And if you only use horror furry, there are games below your game that look like they are affected by the same bug.

(Note to cheaters: we see you and we will delist your pages). The popularity sort is comprised of a “historical” and “recent” component added together.

Since your game is indexed and you obviously have recent and old "popularity", this can only be a bug. There are games below your game with even more ratings, so your game is not the only one.

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GoonerUnleashed28 days ago

Omg thank you so much!! I've sent another mail and it looks like it's fixed!! Who knows how long I would wait if not you! <33

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redonihunter28 days ago

We do not know if it was your first ticket that finally got processed or the new one, or if the bug bugged itself out.

But it might be that one request was filed away under "questions that we do not answer". If there are several issues in one request, people might process one issue and not notice the other issue.

Thing is, the bug is still there and affects other games. At least I do not think the last game in furry+horror should be last while having 450 ratings and a score of 4.6. The popular sorting is supposed to consist of a historical compononent. And while the game is from 2021, it has comments a month ago and surely also more current popularity than some of the games above it, that have 0 ratings. Just scroll up to the game without a cover image. All games below that have a few or many ratings. I think all of those are misplaced.

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redonihunter38 days ago

Itch very likely does not react to sudden spikes for a lot of reasons.

Like this /t/6623069/my-game-appears-to-be-getting-view-botted

And if I look at only the graph you showed, not shifting your position by much, would seem reasonable. After that random spike your traffic returned to the same plateau it had before.

It might help long term, if you actually use some relevant tags. The ai generated tag is redundant, now that ai info is displayed in the info box. So you only use 5 of your 11 tags. And all of those tags have a lot of competition.

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GoonerUnleashed38 days ago

That's a fair point, and I agree that a single traffic spike shouldn't necessarily change a game's ranking.

What makes me think something else may be going on is the overall pattern.

Most of my traffic isn't actually coming from itch.io's internal discovery. It's coming from external search engines:

Google: 28k visits
Yandex: 15k visits
Devlogs and direct links also account for a significant amount of traffic.

Internal sources like tag browsing and the itch.io homepage make up only a relatively small portion of my visits.

Looking at the longer-term analytics, the game was steadily growing for months. Around the time it came out of quarantine (early June), the trend reversed and visibility through itch.io began declining. Since then, I've released two major updates with accompanying devlogs, but my position in tag browsing hasn't changed.

Before quarantine, the game ranked around the top 50 for the furry tag. Today it's near the bottom among 1000+ projects. That's the part I'm trying to understand.

I'm not claiming this is a bug or asking for preferential treatment. Again, I just want to understand whether coming out of quarantine can effectively reset or significantly affect a game's position in rankings and how can I go upper. Because for now, It seems like I'm doing something wrong and my actions have no effect.

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redonihunter37 days ago

I do not know. And Itch will not tell how the mechanics work exactly.

I remember there being threads where games were positioned too low and it apparantly was a bug, but I do not remember those threads mentioning quarantine.

It's unlikely that your game should be near the bottom with a steady traffic. As far as I know, quarantine should not affect this at all, even while in quarantine. At least not directly. A game ist just not shown as a side effet and there is the warning message. But it would make no sense to directly count the quarantine as a popularity metric. It would also not make sense to "punish" quarantined games. So I think it's a bug.

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HKM United28 days ago

Glad it resolved 🎮 One angle that has not come up, in case it helps whoever hits this next:

Each tag is really two separate shelves — the Popular listing and the newest/most-recent listing — and they behave nothing alike. Popular is what this whole thread is about, and it is brutal for a small project even when nothing is broken, because it is carrying a historical component you cannot backfill. The newest listing is the winnable one, and it is where people who browse a specific niche actually look rather than skimming the top of Popular.

Which makes redonihunter’s point about using 5 of 11 tags the bigger lever of the two. Every unused slot is a shelf you are not standing on, and a narrower accurate tag with less competition will out-earn a broad one you are buried at the bottom of. Wrong tags cost twice over, too: they fail to bring the right people AND they occupy a slot a correct tag could have used.

Concrete data point rather than theory — I went through my own project’s tags recently, cut three that described a style the game does not actually have, and added ones that describe what it really is. Nothing else changed, and it sat at the top of the newest listing for its main tag afterwards. That listing is not affected by whatever the popularity sort is doing, which is exactly why it is worth targeting when Popular is misbehaving.

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