{"id":22224,"date":"2018-07-23T16:12:02","date_gmt":"2018-07-23T20:12:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=22224"},"modified":"2018-08-06T14:23:05","modified_gmt":"2018-08-06T18:23:05","slug":"death-by-search-ranking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/23\/death-by-search-ranking\/","title":{"rendered":"Death by Search Ranking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thinkmac.co.uk\/apps\/death-by-search-ranking\/\">Rory Prior<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/thinkmac.co.uk\/apps\/death-by-search-ranking\/\">\n<p>Then something went wrong. [&#8230;] But over the last year or so it seems both apps have slid down (and down) the rankings until the point where they&rsquo;ve become so buried I&rsquo;ve started to regularly see days with low single digit, or even zero sales. When you&rsquo;ve been selling apps for a decade and had previously been able to count on one hand the number of days you&rsquo;ve had zero sales this sets alarm bells ringing <em>very<\/em> loudly.<\/p>\n<p>It&rsquo;s hard to overlook the major changes Apple made to the App Store with iOS 11 &#x2013; search results are now extremely low density. You can barely see two results on a screen at once on a 4.7&#x2033; device, so if you&rsquo;re say 40 or 60 places down your visibility is near zero. But that doesn&rsquo;t explain my apps amazing fall down the rankings. In fact the most confusing thing is seeing apps which haven&rsquo;t been updated in years &#x2013; some of which look like first attempts at programming, with zero reviews, ranking tens of places above mine. What bizarre algorithm sees two apps with the same keyword, and ranks the one with no reviews that hasn&rsquo;t been updated in 3 years above my 5 star one, updated a week ago? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Update (2018-08-06): <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lucvandal\/status\/1026438404295352320\">Luc Vandal<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lucvandal\/status\/1026438404295352320\">\n<p>How can apps that weren&rsquo;t updated for the past 4-5 years even show up first in the search results? What&rsquo;s the incentive for developers to maintain their apps? Will search ever not suck?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rory Prior: Then something went wrong. [&#8230;] But over the last year or so it seems both apps have slid down (and down) the rankings until the point where they&rsquo;ve become so buried I&rsquo;ve started to regularly see days with low single digit, or even zero sales. When you&rsquo;ve been selling apps for a decade [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-08-06T18:23:09Z","apple_news_api_id":"03ea101d-80e9-4e3e-a9cc-485b76cf1aee","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-08-06T18:23:09Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AA-oQHYDpTj6pzEhbds8a7g","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[91,101,31,1472,30,39,1529,343],"class_list":["post-22224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-appstore","tag-business","tag-ios","tag-ios-11","tag-mac","tag-macappstore","tag-macos-10-13","tag-search"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22224"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22371,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22224\/revisions\/22371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}