Rankings plummeted with latest Chrome store update

[gl...@detailed.com]

Hi Everyone!

Does anyone know if the recent extension store ranking updates have finished rolling out?

We've plummeted for some key terms that we've held for years (e.g. 6 -> 24 for 'SEO'), despite having more reviews, users, higher ratings and being updated more than most around us.

No disrespect at all to the two extensions highlighted in my image at the bottom but this update also makes it seem like relevance has dropped quite a bit? Now Etsy tools are outranking us. I realise they have some SEO element to their description, but our stats are objectively great. 

Just as a quick background, we've ran our extension for four years now, proudly reaching 170,000+ users. It has always been free without ads, tracking or similar. We're also incredibly respectful with permissions.

We have the lowest uninstall rate as a % in our history, so any logical metric I can think of (ratings, reviews, updates, uninstall rate, relevance to query) is mostly taken care of.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I promise I'm not trying to be whiny here - and I'm not trying to rank #1 - just feels really odd to be ranking 6th for years, only to now be replaced by tools for Etsy and drop almost 20 places.

Almost feels like some manual flag has been placed on us, so I would love some advice on where to solve that.

[Connor]

Would love to follow and see the resolution to this

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi,

Thank you so much for pointing this out and for the dedication you've shown towards creating and maintaining your extension.

I definitely know how important ranking and visibility is in the Chrome Web Store so appreciate the concern. I'm not certain what happened here, and it does seem surprising, so I've relayed your concerns to the relevant team to investigate. While I cannot guarantee immediate changes, we are certainly looking into it. I can say that I don't see anything to suggest that this is related to action taken on your extension or a larger change in the web store.

As a general note, rankings can change frequently and are based on many factors, so as I'm sure you realise they aren't guaranteed to be static. I don't think that means we shouldn't investigate this case, but I wanted to call that out for anyone else reading this :)

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

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[Simeon Velichkov]

I definitely think that something weird is going on with the ranking. I literally typed in the name of my extension and it is nowhere to be found, I can just keep clicking on 'load more' pages and keep scrolling all day, it's just gone.

Now with the new search on the refreshed UI as soon as I type in my main keyword, also part of the extension name, surely my extension is the first suggestion, but what if I click Enter instead if picking up the first suggestion? Well again, my extension is not only missing from the first 3 results, it is simply not on that list at all even if I keep scrolling and loading more pages.

Then I tried with the other keyword, again part of the extension name, nope, not there at all, this time it is not even in the suggestions.

Maybe it is a temporary issue, but if not this begs the question: what if I as a user wanted to find something useful with that keyword?

[gl...@detailed.com]

Appreciate you taking the time to reply, Oliver.

If you do get any time for updates in the future it would mean a lot. Thank you!

[Simeon Velichkov]

Just to clarify something regarding my previous message that maybe was not clear enough: the extension that I am talking about was the top of its category (search keyword), the second result, and now besides showing up in the suggestions list on the new UI, it is simply gone from the search results, so its not about tweaking the rankings, its about your top extension for that keyword not showing up in the search results at all. Not to mention searching by the exact extension's name not showing in the results either, again not changing position, it is simply not there. So IMO that have to be a bug. I can provide more details if needed.

[Simeon Velichkov]

Hi,

A day after I posted my previous message here the extension that I was referring to above re-appeared in the search results at the exact same position as it was before. Which is nice, but then the second extension next to mine (from another author) disappeared and it did never came back.

Then I noticed that another extension that I have disappeared from the search results on September 30th as well:

Looking at this chart one might think that the CWS impressions are not being reported at the moment, but upon looking at this closer I realized that the service is indeed reporting impressions across the CWS, but it simply flatlined after the extension disappeared from the search results (at least from what I can verify as a probable cause).

In the next chart I'm sampling the last 12 weeks, that generally had lower amount of impressions compared to previous periods, so it should be a fair comparison using the last 3 months only. In this chart the daily impressions across the CWS are grouped into ISO weeks (Monday to Sunday) so that explains why week 39 dips a little bit, because it includes September 30th and October 1st, and also the last week 40 is two days short because I don't have the daily impressions for the weekend yet:

But you get the picture. On average I was getting between 85,000 to 90,000 impressions across the CWS per week, and for the past 7 days I got just 1,643.

My extension can no longer be found using the search box in CWS. Even searching by the extension name does not yield any result. Note that this extension in particular is in a much more competitive segment, so I am not expecting to see it as the first result, but still I am expecting to find it.

Here is another chart showing my daily active users for the past 9 years:

As you can see it was growing really well for the past year or so. Nothing could explain the disappearance, I was certainly not being notified about any change, nor did I changed anything on my end. In fact, I have not touched this extension in the past several months, since I migrated it to MV3. It is also a featured extension if that makes any difference.

I am not providing extension identifiers and names as I don't want this to look like as if I am complaining, but still I hope that you agree that this is pretty much unexplainable behavior for a search engine.

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Simeon,

Thanks so much for the feedback and apologies for the delay replying here. I wanted to make sure I had time to properly read through what was happening.

I saw your comment in the last email but would you be comfortable sharing extension identifiers, either here or by sending me a private email? I'd like to make sure the Chrome Web Store team is aware of this and I think those would be helpful if they need to investigate.

Thanks,

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/chromium-extensions/bc8bc894-d429-49fd-ad6f-21f6202b48ffn%40chromium.org.

[Oliver Dunk]

No worries - would still love your extension ID if you don't mind, so we can make sure it makes sense on our side.

Appreciate the continued feedback.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 1:50 PM Simeon Velichkov <simeonv...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Oliver,

It seems that it got back up on October 11th, so it went missing for about 11 days:

So besides the service not reporting anything for the past few days it seems like it got fixed, at least from what I can tell. My own extensions are back into the search results and also the ones I remember being around them.

Maybe nothing to report at least right now, but I will definitely monitor it and let you know if I notice something strange. I understand that you are currently working on the new version of CWS so I was hoping that this was a going to be a temporary issue because otherwise it didn't make any sense.

Thanks for getting back to me.

[gl...@detailed.com]

Oliver, I really appreciate your time on this, and wanted to wait until the new store was here before I checked again.

Unfortunately, I feel like our worse rankings are now being penalised even more, as search results are hidden behind a 'load more' button after you've seen a few.

The irony is that every metric is improving and we're constantly adding new features and getting amazing feedback, yet our rankings are awful compared to where they were for years.

If you have any advice I would really appreciate it. 

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi all,

I just wanted to mention that Patrick shared an update here which you might find interesting: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/JMtfgiagcgY/m/Vzuy8ZhNAQAJ

Thanks for the continued feedback.

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

On Wed, Nov 15, 2023 at 9:37 AM Simeon Velichkov <simeonv...@gmail.com> wrote:

I also do think that having a 'load more' button on the search results page is not the best way of finding stuff. Maybe it makes more sense to have such button on the discovery tab where you are casually browsing through categories and where you have lots of smaller cards so it can easily become overwhelming if you keep loading more pages. On the search results page on the other hand you have a single large card per row and also in that case you are intentionally searching for something specific, so the chances are that you want to browse through the search results faster, and the 'load more' button gets in the way.

But I'm not a UI/UX designer so feel free to disagree with me.

[Quinn Morgan]

Thanks for understanding how important this is, Oliver.

Our company's Chrome extension has recently dropped in the rankings from #2 to #29 for our main search term, and we've seen our Chrome Web Store impressions drop precipitously after years of steadily climbing. We're now being outranked by many low quality extensions, and even other high-quality competitors of ours are ranking poorly — so it's not just us.

Our browser extension is our company's core product, so this has negatively impacted us so severely that it's put our company's future in question. I suspect we're not alone in facing this existential threat. 

I understand there may have been a change to help newer extensions rank higher in order to provide a more fair playing field for new entrants, but I'd argue that it's quite likely that the traffic split evenly isn't likely enough to sustain any company in the long term, and thus the Chrome Web Store will eventually be left devoid of any extensions delivered by professional developers like us. That's a sad potential future for our startup of course, but I'd argue that it would be a major loss for Chrome users and Google too.

Even for the new entrants, if you can't count on your extension continuing to rise in the ranking as you improve it and gain user adoption/love, then what's the path to success? Seemingly arbitrary rankings, or even rankings that change week-to-week, break the predictable success ladder that's been working for extensions for years. We launched our startup in 2019, nearly a decade after the launch of the CWS. Our main competitor had 200k installs at the time, and we had zero. The point is, despite the fact that the marketplace was fully mature, we were able to climb in the rankings over the years. I'd like to think that we earned our #2 spot, and it was pretty clear that we were on track to eventually rank #1. But now we're not even on the first two pages of results. I'm sure you can imagine how our team's hearts dropped when we realized this had occurred after so many years of hard-won progress.

I sincerely hope Google makes some changes soon, and the extensions that have earned their large user bases over the years will be returned to ranking higher for their respective search terms. Otherwise we'll likely have to start making some hard decisions.

[Rajat Paharia]

Following. I have yet to launch my extension but do hope to be able to build a business from it, and Quinn's points resonate. 

[Tony Batts]

Following as well, recently upgraded one of my extensions from v2 to v3 and noticed that on a users machine it actually made the extension disappear but still show up in the extensions page. They had to delete the extension and redownload in order for it to work again. I believe this is the cause of my extensions 400+ uninstalls since upgrading to v3.

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Quinn,

Thanks for your post and apologies for the slightly delayed response.

As mentioned in Patrick's post, the Chrome Web Store team is very aware of the feedback - making changes to improve the overall ranking quality is a priority. We still want large extensions like yours to rank well and I'm not aware of any changes with the intent of sacrificing that to favor new extensions.

You mentioned seeing a noticeable change in ranking for your main search term - if you're still seeing that, could you share the term so we can investigate?

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB

[Michal Wosniak]

Hi Oliver,

I was searching for a solution to a problem and came across this thread. My extension (ID: olhmdeioemochcmndjfcgfnpmhkckgif) was ranked first in the Chrome Web Store for the keyword 'YouTube transcript generator' and second for 'YouTube transcript' for several months. However, this week I added a website to the listing page, and the extension dropped to 10th place in the search results (I checked from different accounts, and the results are not personalized).

I suspect other developers may be experiencing similar changes in search engine rankings, which remain not only opaque but also highly unpredictable.

Any updates from the CWS team on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Oliver Dunk]

Hi Michal,

Thanks for sharing that. We still don't have anything specific to share - as I've mentioned previously in this thread and as I'm sure you can understand, ranking is a hard problem and we change things often to try and improve the ordering. I still don't think we're where I want us to be, but the team is working hard and I've definitely seen a lot to show that they are taking all of the feedback on board.

Given your ranking still seems somewhat sensible, I don't think there is anything specific to investigate here, but do keep us posted with how things go over time.

Thanks,

Oliver Dunk | DevRel, Chrome Extensions | https://developer.chrome.com/ | London, GB