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.