No Roblox games show up in Google search

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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?

I mean on search engines. It is kinda a yes and no but I leaned toward no. Cause we have in game ads. And you’re most likely already going to find top games, or scams of some sort. And that is the same thing on Roblox. So it really doesn’t affect it.

You also have to weigh in that people use ad blockers - myself included. As for the Roblox game search itself I would much rather be able to Google a game I’m looking for than relying on an unreliable search system.

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If you would like a better explanation on how search engines search you can read this.

I know how meta tags works in regards to SEO. That’s not what I was referring to. My original reply was in regards to how Roblox’s game search isn’t always very reliable and consistent. To that extent pulling Roblox games off of Google searches can affect discoverability for a game if the Roblox search system doesn’t find the game you’re looking for.

My point is, Google searches are less reliable than the website. People fill their games with tags and that gets shown to Google.

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Except nothing of that sort was stated in Roblox’s official response.

“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.”

Those included scams and other games of the sort.

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Any ETA on when it will be unblocked?

My games rely heavily on marketing via YouTube videos, where people typically will google the name of the game to find it. Youtubers normally don’t put the game link in their description, so players use Google, just like they would find anything else. Ever since this change, I’ve had far fewer players, and have just been waiting for it to be changed back again. It just so happens that advertisements became a lot worse at the same time, so really any way that I would use before to get an influx of players are no longer effective. Multiple developers I have spoken with find themselves in the same situation and are demotivated because of it.

I understand there are reasons for the change, but I think the fact that this is damaging a lot of games and demotivating developers should be taken into consideration. It would be nice to at least get an ETA to help remove any uncertainty regarding how long “temporarily” is.

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