I’m hoping to get some insight into the search ranking on the site. I uploaded my 3D model for creating custom QR codes some time ago, and it has consistently been incredibly popular – it’s actually the most downloaded model on the platform for a significant period!
However, when I perform a search using the terms “qrcode” or “qr code” and sort by relevance, my model consistently appears very far down the list of results. This has been the case for a while now, despite its sustained popularity.
I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar with their long-standing, popular models not ranking well for relevant keywords. Could there be something I’m missing in terms of how the search algorithm prioritizes models over time? Or perhaps there is indeed an unexpected issue/bug?
Any thoughts or experiences you could share would be greatly appreciated. I’m just trying to understand why a consistently highly downloaded and seemingly relevant model isn’t showing up higher in the search results for such common queries, especially given its established popularity.
The relevance sorting is a mistery to me, and not only in makerworld, in printables as well, usually i just sort by downloads or by likes, that’s for me the best way to navigate the repositories (all of them not only makerworld)
The searched used to make sense a few weeks ago. But they clearly messed around with the algorithm very recently and it is now producing silly results.
Your current ranking is low because the title is too long and doesn’t closely match the search term “qr code.” The phrase “Ultimate QR Code Generator: Text, Wi-Fi & More” dilutes keyword relevance. Try renaming it to “QR Code Generator” for a much better match and likely higher ranking.
You might even receive a penalty for using the word ‘ultimate,’ since they’ve already mentioned that models and profiles containing terms like ‘best,’ ‘better,’ and similar could be flagged. However, this is speculative.
I’m going to experiment with different titles to try and understand how to improve the SEO aspects, and I hope this improves the situation. It’s actually strange that even though the model is popular, someone searching for ‘qr code’ has difficulty finding it.
What the person above says is definitely true. I did a fair amount of testing with this a few months back, the cool thing is, you can see an immediate effect of changing your model title in the search results.
Try what they suggest, slim down the title to just “QR Code Generator” and then wait a min and do a search for QR code etc and see where you now fall in the relevance rankings.
Same thing applies with tags - if you add/remove tags you can see how it will impact your relevance rankings.
My testing found what others suggest here - shorter titles and less tags = higher relevance rankings.
I tried again just a few hours ago, but nothing’s different. I think it’s not only the title that matters, but also when the model was created. I believe their aim is to push newer content more than older content (even if it’s popular). Sadly, this makes searching quite ineffective.
FWIW yours is still top of the search if you choose to sort by downloads/boosts etc (which I do often since the ‘relevance’ search results are all over the place)
Their relevance ranking must have some weird logic in place - I have no idea how yours appears so low when sorting by relevance. There are other popular models such as ULTIMATE QR CODE-NFC TAG-FIDGET-SPINNER-FOB by The Big Greek - MakerWorld which appear near the top despite being similar in age.