My game, Pet Fortress, mysteriously dropped from ALL search terms it ranked highly on after a small update to the experience description (added a few colorful icons/bullet points to format the description better).
Upon seeing this issue, I attempted multiple times to revert the experience description to what it was prior, but it seems to remain ‘blacklisted’ from search. For example it was above the fold when searching for “fortress” (i.e. within the first 20 results or so), now you can scroll through thousands of results and never see it for the search term,
likewise for the full name “pet fortress” it was the number one result without quotes, and now is nowhere to be seen. I ran multiple ads to get those placements for those keywords and now all of that is simply vanished through this bug. Appreciate looking into the cause as there’s no point to advertise my experience with this bug present.
Here’s a snapshot from analytics page showing the potential timing of search impressions instantly dropping to zero
Hi @ph33sh , we apologize for this issue where the experience all of a sudden fell off search.
Updating description the way you did should not have caused this and our team confirmed that it has nothing to do with the description update.
We are currently working on a query<>title relevance fix in the search system that we hope to ship in the next few months. This improvement should bring this experience back above the fold under related queries such as “pet fortress”.
p.s. I liked the game play of Pet Fortress! The sniper mode is sick.
Thanks for the reply and that’s good that there’s a general future fix planned…but it’s unacceptable to continue to be dropped from search for two months - this would not be remotely acceptable for any larger experience.
There’s many other threads from this issue happening on the dev forum where the experience was ‘re-instated’ to search results without waiting for any future update/fix to the search system. Again there’s no search term that will show the game any longer- this exactly coincided with updating the experience name + description but reverting did not fix.
Is there a way to ‘reset’ assessment by search algo?
