Why do apps sometimes disappear from App Store category rankings?

[payASO]

Hi everyone, my first post here!

We recently noticed something very interesting in the App Store: one of our apps completely disappeared from category rankings for a few weeks, with no impact on browse downloads, which actually went up.

We reached out to Apple but didn’t get any clear explanation. No metadata changes, no updates, nothing obvious. Then, after some weeks, the app reappeared lol

thanks!!

 

[davamosk]

didn't you get a "warning" from apple telling you to stop a suspicious activity? - that happened to me two months in an app which was running incentivized installs in order to boost organic rankings and we were with no ranking for +60days. During that time, we had to maintain the incentivized the traffic because if we paused, Apple would confirm that we were in fact running something ilegal.

 

[dryochest]

The most important factor impacting category rankings is your Downloads Velocity = the amount of downloads your app gets within a specific timeframe, most likely that's last 24hrs or so. So maybe you had a drop in the overall downloads volume?

Nevertheless, unless you're a game, category rankings really do not provide much value. Even reaching top #3 in the US in a popular category will bring you a few hundred downloads max., which is relatively low amount, taking into account how hard it gets to be in the top 3.

 

[payASO]

didn't you get a "warning" from apple telling you to stop a suspicious activity? - that happened to me two months in an app which was running incentivized installs in order to boost organic rankings and we were with no ranking for +60days. During that time, we had to maintain the incentivized the traffic because if we paused, Apple would confirm that we were in fact running something ilegal.

hmmmmmm interesting

sounds like we are in the same boat. We ve actually never received any formal warning from Apple either, and whenever we have contacted them, they just dont say anything concrete or explain the issue...

We also kept the incentivized traffic going, and after about a month and a half we managed to reappear in the rankings… but now we’ve disappeared again lol


So yeah, makes sense, it is pretty likely this is totally tied to that kind of traffic...

 

[davamosk]

hmmmmmm interesting

sounds like we are in the same boat. We ve actually never received any formal warning from Apple either, and whenever we have contacted them, they just dont say anything concrete or explain the issue...

We also kept the incentivized traffic going, and after about a month and a half we managed to reappear in the rankings… but now we’ve disappeared again lol


So yeah, makes sense, it is pretty likely this is totally tied to that kind of traffic...

careful with deleting it 100% - you could be "confirming" that you were running some "blackhat" traffic and that would lead to a formal ban from the store.

Try to reduce it very slowly

 

[ImzyT9169]

I’ve heard rumours of bugs on Apple’s algorithm that can lead to random removals of category rankings from (all off the record from their end) that aren’t tied to any incentivised traffic. Haven’t heard myself why or how but based on this it seems possible that your category ranking could be removed for a period of time for no viable reason, and with no contact to your developer account admins.