Oh dear you really wouldnt have wanted to see my fish drawing! But I see why it’s there. I shall retitle it as probably it doesn’t appear when you search fot ‘fish’
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A lovely fish but it did take me by surprise 
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I didn’t see your fish Helen or mirrors lol 
but I have to admit I only looked at the titles of the first couple and noticed Mirror was the first word…i havn’t heard of Mirror in a knitting term before so I learnt something new today
I am puzzled by the Search / Categories.
I decided to look on Google for one of my elephants and Google resolutely declined to find them though I have two designs and two colours of each.
I therefore decided just to search for Stained Glass Suncatcher and sure enough Folksy did appear
So I had a look at what it had selected and was very surprised to find a lot of things which were indeed glass suncatchers but not stained glass and stained glass was quite correctly not mentioned in the description, title, tags or category of any of the listings i checked as they are not stained glass but fused or painted glass.
How is Folksy managing to categorise them as stained glass please ?
If you look at the url of the page that google is returning it says stained glass (hense google picking up on it for your search) but the category that the url links to says glass suncatchers. At some point folksy have broadened the scope of what can be included in the category from just stained glass suncatchers to any type of glass suncatcher but didn’t change the url as that would have caused it to loose all backlinks/ google search ranking. When the category definition was broadened sellers duly populated it with relevant items for the new category definition hence the fused glass items.
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Maybe then Folksy need to add a category for the other types of glass suncatchers as I got to all those non stained glass suncatchers the way most people would via a search on Google ?
And was rather surprised by what I found and as most was not what I had searched for or wanted I left 
and bought elsewhere as it was stained glass suncatchers I wanted and had searched for.
There is definitely a huge difference for me, I’ve had one search item for weeks and that is ‘painted horse’ I used to get search terms like ‘ greeting card’ greetings card’ ‘floral card’ ‘blank card’ etc etc so I know I was at least being found here, now nothing at all, I can’t believe no one is searching using any of those terms and the only thing that’s changed is the webinar. All very depressing. I even had buttons, cardigans and textile flowers come up before I gave up searching for my work pages and pages in on some of my searches.
I’m not sure what the answer is going forward.
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AI and algorithms just dont have any common sense, nor do they really work with the way the English language works. In English we put the adjective before the noun, so the first word in a phrase is not what the item is. So search engines set up to favour the first word will constantly fail to give good results. The person looking for a “diamond shaped purse” will get hits for diamonds (not that they’d be on Folksy but you get my drift!), probably ahead of purses. Or as had been said, “mirror knitting” (I’ve never heard of it either) comes up in a search for mirrors , probably ahead of something like “bevelled edged mirror”. Until search engines can distinguish between a noun and an adjective, or realise that in English we dont put the noun first, then they will never work well. Its not like many other languages eg French - boite bleu, but English is blue box.
Having said all that I think Folksy’s search is a lot better than “speak not the name’s” where someone found a make up bag I was selling with the search phrase “wooden handled toilet brush” !!!
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I just don’t understand why up until a few weeks ago I was getting seen and now Im invisible. There are folk with the same titles as mine come up now problem, there are folk with similar titles but my work has disappeared into the ether on here.
I’ve read the blog about getting seen in listings, I’ve applied what I’ve understood of that but still nothing.
If I search for much more targeted items I pop up and I don’t even mind so much that I don’t appear in a more general search because there are so many people selling cards now, but I just don’t get why I was being found and now I’m not. Hey ho, the mysteries of the internet I guess.
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I must admit I watched the webinar, changed titles etc and some of it doesn’t make sense, I just typed in teddy bear, I had some items show up where teddy bear is mid sentence of the title before some that are the first two words, my results were better before the search system was changed. I will have a look at my stats, I don’t bother with them much as I’m pretty sure half of it is me popping to my own shop because quite regularly I have to sign back in so my visiting will show as site visits. The only bit that I find interesting is where people are searching from as quite often they are from other countries. My stats are usually pretty poor.
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I’d had most of the criteria in place before I watched the Webinar and still it doesn’t particularly work. Sadly, I’ve just forked out for another year of plus account but I’m not sure I’ll resubscribe for next year if things don’t improve on here. Sales just fine on my own website and over yon. Though it was slow in February and March all round.
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Yes I had most of it in place to be honest but did switch some wording around in titles. My items still show in searches and some near front but there have been other things in front of them that don’t necessary have the exact search words at the beginning of the titles.
I am still selling but I think quieter than usual although I know some of my customers are having a spend free few months currently due to other expenses. Hopefully it will pick up for everyone soon
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