Was wondering if anyone else has seen (for some apps) quite dynamic changes in the rankings. I have had apps go from the top 6 to below 40, others stay the same and a few improve.
Has there been an algorithm change or is this usual?
A little concerned as rankings do play a part in monetisation.
Would be interested if anyone else overnight has had the same experience.
Noticed a few changes as well. From what I can tell, the rankings seem to be giving even more weight to apps with a large download count. Google doesn’t really want new developers getting into the market, it seems.
Thanks for the responses. On doing some more analysis I have noticed that some of my apps that are directly niche targeted using keywords aren’t ranking for those title keywords and ‘other’ totally irrelevant apps are (so much for google search engine relevance!). Ironically some of those same apps are performing better on the shorter tail keywords(ironic isn’t it?)
Some of my apps that have performed better have few downloads and some apps that have more downloads than the competition have fared worse. What I have noticed is that apps that have gone up seem to be older.
I am coming to suspect because of the keyword title thing some change in the algorithm has occurred. Every day I usually check the downloads from my play admin panel for the updated stats about 9.30 am (here). the dashboard didn’t update till after 4pm which I thought was highly unusual. I thought it may have had something to do with apps/accounts being banned over the weekend and some repositioning occurring. Perhaps both are linked:(
We’re currently aware of an issue causing some developers to not appear correctly in Google Play search. This is also effecting the Developers Apps page, which shows all apps by a specific developer. We appreciate your patience while we work on a fix for these issues.
so, this is not algorithm change it is a bug and also my apps also got affected badly because of this.
My app’s rankings for quite a few search terms took a big hit today compared to last week. I thought it was because I added some HTML tags to the description but now I guess that’s not the cause.