One of my customers suggested I promote my item by stressing more its integration with WooCommerce, because he said that he had a hard time finding a plugin that did what my item does. Although my item always had the appropriate tags to acknowledge that, I thought it would be a good idea to include that in the title as well.
After changing the title, I noticed a huge drop in search results. My item used to be the first result when searching for “WordPress audio”, now it is 11th which cannot be explained by any other factor that comes to my mind: rating is and has always been 5.0, sales increased, updates roll out regularly. Nevertheless, that is not the main issue in my observations.
When searching for “WooCommerce audio” – which was the main point of changing the title in the first place – my item shows up on the second page (ranking 33th in the search). What’s wrong with that? Out of the first 30 results on the first page, 29 of them:
– are not related to audio at all
– don’t include the word “audio” anywhere in the title
– don’t include the tag “audio” or even less the tag “woocommerce audio”
The first item related to audio is ranking 24th in the search. The second item related to audio is my item and ranks 33th (second page). None of the other 31 items is related to audio at all.
There is more. When searching for “audio woocommerce”, the item that ranked 24th when searching for “woocommerce audio” is now the 1st result and my item that was earlier 33th is now the 2nd result. In addition to including the tags “audio” and “woocommerce” separately, both the items also include the tag “woocommerce audio” in its entirety but don’t include the tag “audio woocommerce”.
Now, although I understand a slight difference in the search results when changing the order of the keywords because the algorithm might weigh each word differently based on their position, that doesn’t explain results that are completely unrelated to the second keyword in a two-keyword search.
I think there are enough elements suggesting that there is something inherently wrong in how the search algorithm works.
when you searching using terms “ WordPress audio ” or “ audio woocommerce ” or “ woocommerce audio ” then each individual word is a keyword and search criteria searching for each keyword and giving result accordingly. this is the main reasong you are getting such different positions result and not related audio but related to keyword “ WordPress ” or “ woocommerce ” or “ audio ” for those terms.
Hi, @mgscoder,
Thanks for your input but, to be honest and with all due respect, what you are saying doesn’t make sense and contradicts the purpose itself of a search engine. If a user searches for multiple keywords, it means that they want the results to be related to all of them (AND-type search) not to just one of them (OR-type search). The results I am getting fail the need of including multiple keywords to refine a search.
If I write “woocommerce audio”, it should be obvious that I am not interested in ANY item related to woocommerce only but specifically in those that are ALSO related to audio which is not at all what the market search engine outputs.
According to what you are saying, it should be acceptable that searching for “red shoes” on Google, I would get “red pants” or “red hats” instead, which is obviously not what Google outputs as the first results. As a matter of fact, if you search “woocommerce audio” in Google, the first 30 results are nothing BUT results that are related to both woocommerce AND audio. Furthermore, there should be little to no difference at all between “woocommerce audio” and “audio woocommerce”, exactly as it happens on Google.
It is also worth noting that, searching for “woocommerce audio” on Google, my plugin is the 9th results over 16 MILLION results (searching in Incognito), with the first 8 results ALL related to both woocommerce and audio. On Envato, the total results are 2301, my item is the 32th one and 30 of the previous results are not related to audio at all.
This is a major flaw that should be seriously looked at.
as far I understand envato search criteria divide the full search terms into individual word with each keyword of the terms and one keyword with all words of the full terms. so when you are searching for “ WordPress audio ” then search criteria is working for: “ WordPress ” or “ audio ” or “ WordPress audio ”. I think envato doing this search criteria for suggesting more items to the customers. I understand your concern but if searching for the full terms as a single keyword then there is a possibilty to get a very few results and also possible to get no result in case the full terms not match.
If what you are saying is accurate, this is very concerning!
In my opinion, offering customers who are looking for a specific item 20+ results that are completely unrelated is much worse than returning no results at all. If I get no results, at least I know that my searching criteria were too tight and I can try again loosening them. By contrast, if a search for something specific gets me 2300 results, I expect at least the FIRST 10 or 20 to be the strongest ones. Which is not even close, in this case.
just I have shared my personal opinion but you can share it to author support to get more specific answer and also you can share your suggestions with them.
Thanks, @mgscoder. I appreciate your inputs.