Comments on: App Store Rankings Frozen in Time

By: Dale Larson

Dale Larson — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:14:22 +0000

There are SEO people who whine every time Google changes something. Every little detail matters to them because their primary marketing techniques are all about taking technical advantage of the system. Their content and offers tend to be of questionable value anyway.

The majority of good folks follow a few basic good practices but the majority of their time is spent producing good content and products. Their marketing strategy is to focus on their audience/customers more than on Google. These folks tend to be in good shape whatever the changes.

Changes like this mean that the app market place is continuing to mature. Pushing a new release with insignificant changes shouldn’t lead to a free marketing bump. Yes, it creates new challenges for marketers, it’s important to know about and respond to, but good call by Apple.

Thanks for sharing the info, Aaron!

By: Todd Bernhard

Todd Bernhard — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:49:50 +0000

It was actually worse… they had the Top 100 for each category showing brand new and frankly, otherwise unpopular apps for several hours. The #1 app for a while became “iGlowStickPro” which was brand new and hardly a bestseller.

The rankings have been fixed but there is a new change in their system. Presumably, in the process of making the change, that’s how they broke things.

The big change: New Releases now only shows brand new 1.0 apps. Updated apps don’t appear.

The outage was very frustrating. My app, 100sounds, had been 72 in Entertainment, but for several hours over the past 2 days, it was completely absent from the charts. Now, it’s 63, so the damage was temporary!
But that GlowStick app got rocketed to #9, thanks to the publicity from those few hours!