Roblox game kicked out of search results - killed the game

What I want to achieve? Making my game searchable again.

Howdy, I recently released a game called “Prison Life 5”. It was doing pretty well with 10+ players. Upon searching for the “Prison Life” keyword, you would find my game high up at the 3rd row. But now it’s at 0-3 players only getting traffic from my other games advertising for it. The reason? After a week of being published, the game got kicked back to the 15th row or something like that. Basically unsearchable. This happened instantly, not a steady decline.


I’m wondering if anyone has some information on this or if it got “shadow banned”. Really weird because games that performed terribly are higher up than mine, and you have to scroll down many irrelevant games before seeing Prison Life 5.

So far I contacted Roblox Support and after going through some 12 emails, they were not helpful. I also tried looking at some dev forum posts, but it’s hard to tell whether they have the same issue or not. Would mean a lot to me if someone could help. Thanks!

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It doesn’t look like a shadow ban, not to be rude, but the game looks and sounds like a clickbait copy of the original prison life. Your game might just be deranked by other clickbaity games that are getting more active users. Check some of the other games’ descriptions to get an idea of what metadata they’re using that might be helping rank them higher.

Also your second screenshot you searched “prison life” – the algorithm may not be trying to find the ‘5’ over similar active games that users who play prison life are also playing

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If you’re wondering why, this is due to roblox experimenting with algorithm. Make sure to mark this as a solution for others wondering why

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Bro you don’t understand. My game used to be high in the top but within a minute it got deranked to an unsearchable level. It’s not a clickbait game, and it did a better job than many games above me. When ranked high in search results, my game did way better than those beside me like “PRISON LIFE 4”.

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I read through a lot of posts in this discussion, and I can agree that both mine and theirs are related to the Roblox algorithm. The reason for our problems are way different though. Haven’t seen anyone with my issue yet of suddenly disappearing from search after good performance.

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Alright, Update on the game: it got bounced back up again. Not sure what happened entirely though.

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