Rankings dropped after Vacation Mode - advice?

[mystic_insight]

Hey everyone!

I caught a really bad cold and had to mutually cancel probably 40 orders which sucked. After I mutually cancelled them, I went on vacation mode for about 2 weeks.

When I get back on, my best selling gig dropped 4-5 spots, and probably 90% of my other gigs have no publicity at all. No publicity on the site = no sales! I would have 50-60 orders pending at a time and now it is slashed less than half.



Any ideas on what to do? This whole VM has been a mess for me.

[Guest mehmoodahmad72]

hi

[chimicawriting]

Glad you at least feel better. You could always let those canceled buyers know you’re back. Social media could help also by promoting your services there too. From 50 to zero orders sucks but it’ll pick up soon.

[fonthaunt]

I hate that VM does that but I’ve had the same experience even with shorter time periods. I’ve gone on VM for no more than 3 days and had every gig drop completely out of search. I’ve also suspended gigs instead hoping that would be better, and that drops them too. The only way I’ve been able to retain anything is only slightly better, which is setting my delivery lengths all to maximum which does drive away buyers. From what I can tell, though, even that affects our position in search since if you aren’t getting orders for any reason, you get penalized for that.



I’m so sorry you are having this issue on top of lost work and healing up. I had one gig that only had a few reviews so I suspended it and completely re-created it and that did put it back into search, but then it displays like a new gig with no reviews which sucks. It is the only way I’ve found to really restart a gig, but since I’ve only been on Fiverr a few months maybe I haven’t happened on to a better way. I’m guessing that anything you do that gets you a few orders helps push your gig back up but if so, it’s a very slow process. A heartfelt good luck!

[mystic_insight]

Reply to @chimicawriting: Thank you! Most of them did come back but my main problem is getting my gigs to show up in the search results again. Most of them don’t show up, or are very, very low in the rankings. Really sucks.

[mystic_insight]

Reply to @fonthaunt: I even created a few new gigs and they don’t even show up in the New Gigs section. This algorithm stuff is BS tbh. A person with a 97% rating, too many negative reviews to count, 21 hour response time, and started fiverr 3 months ago is ahead of me at this point.



I’m just not sure what to do at this point - I’ll probably change a few things here and there. Hopefully I can bring up my gigs soon!

[fonthaunt]

Reply to @mystic_insight: I hope so too! I agree, the algorithm stuff is crap. If you get a chance, update the thread if you tweak things and boost your gigs, I would love to know about it!

[mrproofreading]

I honestly don’t think it’s the vacation mode causing your decline in sales.



Over Christmas, I was on vacation for around 21 days. If you look at my profile, you’ll see that on the day I came back, I received lots of orders (look at the charts).



I think your downfall in sales was caused by the mutual cancellations. Mutual cancellations can no longer be used to downgrade account levels; however, I’m pretty sure that they’re used in the algorithm to determine your search ranking.



This once happened to me when I was ill for about a week, causing my to lose a lot of the ‘prime’ spots I held in search. However, after around two weeks, my ranking restored itself naturally.



Hope this helps.

[mystic_insight]

Reply to @mrproofreading: I’ve been told alot that MC doesn’t affect your ratings.

You could be possibly right - it sure did bring down my rankings, so technically mutual cancellations DO affect your ratings 😕

[microtasks]

I recently created a Fiverr account. Among my initial worries was this. I plan on offering seasonal/holiday gigs. I was worried that I would fade into obscurity after that. I guess I will have to create a more mainstream gig, or generalize my planned gigs. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost then it’s back to the marketing board. 😕

[writerlisaz]

I’m so afraid to take days off because of the possibility of this happening. About one day a week, I just hit a wall and my eyes start twitching from fatigue and I have to take a day off. But I’m afraid to! I don’t want my rankings to drop. I’m on a roll with my copyediting and proofreading gig, and I love having such regular business. I have taken 1-2 days off at a time, but not every week and with reluctance. I also keep my delivery time really quick because that gets customers. I guess we just have to do what we have to do. I’m sorry this happened to you when you were sick. I have wondered what would happen if I actually got the flu or something where I couldn’t work at all, and am afraid of that. I have a lot of repeat clients already, after just 3 months here, but I still need the new ones that find me because of my high listing on the search.

[wikihelp]

Don’t worry, they should return to normal within a couple weeks. I’ve done the same thing before with both suspending my gigs and using vacation mode. Each time they returned to their original spots after a week or so 🙂

[vivdub]

I am too facing the same thing.
I was on vacation mode for a month or two and then when I returned back my gigs are not performing like they were earlier.
The rankings are placing it where they place gigs of new and Level 1 sellers, and it has been many days now.

[adsensewizard]

That’s a common issue. Almost everyone reports the rankings are different after a vacation. But never have I seen updates if they go back to normal soon. It does make sense, as if you don’t get orders, rankings drop.

So if you don’t want it to happen, you can’t have a vacation. You need to be a robot that works 24/7. But one thing that would help is to increase delivery time to maximum, 30 ish days and disable extra fast service. But you would need to edit your gig and have in big letters that the wait time is X days, as the delivery time on the gig’s page is only an average.