same thing here, noticed it while searching on my phone, it isn’t just games, its profile links aswell.
anything from roblox.com is filtered.
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I can confirm this, was able to replicate on Macbook Air 2020. The only roblox-affiliated link that will show up is the devforum link.
Well… What if a kid still uses google and sees those same results, except now ON TOP OF THAT, they won’t even find the game they were looking for, which could possibly lead them into coming across something even worse.
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I think I read somewhere that they’re removing the feature to look up roblox content in google because of the text filtering.
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Thats ridiculous, if you’re removing the official search result, scammers can easily create fake sites and get their search result at the top, children and developers will click the link thinking its the roblox site, yet they get scammed off of their account instantly.
Nobody is going to pay attention to it being a fake link as everyone is used to finding the official result at the top of a search engine.
So basically, children + developers who are used to doing this are all instantly scammed because roblox removed the ability to search for roblox.com links.
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This has always happened to me, except for adopt me and jailbreak
Isn’t roblox hurting itself with this aswell?
This would make it harder for new people and already existing users to find roblox via a search engine as they would probably look for “fun games” or “roblox” on the search engine, not knowing how to reach the site by entering the full link in the bar at the top.
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Hi developers, thank you for the report.
We’re temporarily blocking directories, including /games, from search engines while we address inconsistencies on what you can find on our platform versus off-platform search engines. This does not impact game search on the Roblox platform.
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Roblox is not affiliated with COPPA. COPPA is something that all websites / apps / whatever need to comply with, just because something isn’t affiliated with COPPA doesn’t mean they don’t have to comply with it. We can discuss this further in DMs.
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I hope this change is very short term and temporary. I have been sharing my game with a lot of family and friends in the last 2 weeks, especially ones who are less familiar with roblox so are unaware of what the roblox search engine is. I just feel like it’s hurting discoverability significant in that sense, especially from people who are new to roblox - or learn about roblox through a YouTube video etc.
I just hope this change doesn’t last long
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I don’t think this is Roblox mistake
Google should make rule for roblox games but yeah, As I search some of non-popular/popular as roblox player I expect this will give me as best result / There is maybe reason why roblox games links do not pop up maybe it google and other web searchers are taking it like deep-web not as surface-web but that would be dumb because you don’t need to be logined in roblox to show games links but true is that now you can’t play roblox without account maybe that is reason, simple only roblox account are able to play it so roblox it is considering as deep web anyway with this topic we can talk hours and hours and hours
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Will this change be reverted any time soon?
If someone sees our game on YouTube they will typically google it.
This is the same for any other game, Roblox or not. Search engines are a standard for finding things
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Im sure it will. Someone could find the game in the link on the YouTube description because googling stuff would technically show up stuff, but not much. Sometimes, google does find stuff but not always sometimes. Its kind of useful to find stuff but its pretty easy to find certain things with roblox too. This could possibly be reverted.
I want to make sure it’s understood that this is not acceptable as a permanent or long-term solution. A chunk of new players to my game come from googling the game name found on YouTube, as is the case for every other developer on the platform.
If this was done for e.g. trust & safety reasons and it turns out that preventing weird google search terms from returning naughty games on the platform just isn’t feasible, this is not an acceptable state to leave the platform in in the meantime.
I would argue that doing this at all when it has been this way for a long time is heavy-handed and excessively panicky.
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Yes I agree with you PeZsmistic, sometimes game names come up in google search engine but most of the time it comes from some search random things. Make sure that some search results are correct because sometimes random stuff pops up on google.
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Google uses crawlers that go through a file called robots.txt that says what endpoints it can visit and what it can’t visit. You can view it here. It will basically go through every endpoint and keep going down until it can’t anymore.
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Can you clarify the meaning of “temporarily” in this case? I’m concerned this will follow in the footsteps of other “SoonTM” changes that have been made in the past. It’s been well over a month and this issue is still ongoing, and the vague wording isn’t doing much to dissuade concerns.
Is there a concrete plan to fix this issue? What’s the timeline? Or is this just a temporary measure to prevent PR disasters during the upcoming IPO? For the removal of such a major source of discovery for my game, I’d really like to get some clarification on what’s being done about this.
Edit: oh nooooo. U.S. gaming platform Roblox to delay IPO until next year | Reuters
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I noticed Roblox was hiding results from search engines months ago and was kind of confused as to why. Many people have stated how this affects discoverability (it doe), but I’m really curious as to what these inconsistencies are. I personally prefer using a search engine over the native Roblox search bar to find games because, well — we all know why.
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It really doesn’t affect discoverability. A lot of scams and people trying to profit off of premium payout will embed tags in games. The the description is part of the metadata that search engines use.
By definition, it does affect discoverability if it isn’t available to search engines. Are you referring to discoverability on the actual Roblox website?