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

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

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

Like this https://itch.io/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.

Like Reply

GoonerUnleashed8 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.

Like Reply

redonihunter7 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.

Like Reply