iTunes App Store Rank Manipulation!
In the old days (i.e. a couple of months ago) if you wanted to increase your ranking in the iTunes App store all you needed to do was to pay folks to download your app. Apple put a stop to the manipulation by negatively impacting your rating if your users never used your app. Our primary competitor’s rank fell through the floor and we moved from #11 to #2 in the market. Something happened a few days ago to our ranking – dropping us to #5. We have a small number of 1/2 star rankings for ShopSavvy right now, the HUGE majority are 4/5 stars and very positive. Apple has a feature that allows you to mark a review as helpful or unhelpful. We think someone is trying to manipulate our ranking by “Liking” our negative reviews. With as few as 10 “Likes” a review will move to the top of your reviews. No one seems to like our 5-star reviews. Anyway, we have reported the activity to Apple and hopefully they will be able to determine who is doing it. In the meantime we are asking everyone to go to their desktop iTunes installation, search for ShopSavvy and “Like” our 5-star reviews and “Dis-Like” our 1-star reviews. Click Here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/shop-savvy-barcode-scanner/id338828953?mt=8
For real? You want people to go and manipulate review like-ableness to counter what you are trying to report to Apple as irregularity? That’s hypocritical if you just say it and psycho if you believe it. Reviews being liked/disliked does not change your rating in category, it only changes the “most helpful” sort order for showing reviews, so chill out.
The reviews have a DIRECT impact on your rating in a category because people who might otherwise download your app will NOT download it if the reviews are negative. By ranking UP the minority of negative reviews it looks like the app doesn’t work. Our hope is that we can get people who have had positive experiences with the app (the vast majority) to rank up positive reviews so they show up first instead of the negative ones.
I looked at your app popularity over time chart at http://appshopper.com/utilities/shopsavvy . I see that while in the last few days your app had fallen from ~70 to 93 position, this is not the case in the category “utilities” top200, where it still is in the top 5. So what had happened? It is not that you are falling out of favor – it is that some (new?) apps in different categories are becoming popular and pushing down in the list the old leaders.
It seems to be a direct result of the store manipulation I describe above.