Etsy search clumping issue - solved? What now?

Please note: this post probably will only be interesting for Etsy Sellers :)

In the begging of October a glitch on Etsy search appeared - the 'uber dominancy' or 'clumping' called in forums by sellers.

The 'uber dominancy' of search results by just a few shops made lots and lots of other sellers lacking of views, and in consequence, sells. I've seen it myself, using 'silk scarf' term for search. It was madness. Pages after pages of similar scarfs from one shop... for the customers? that was really bad. Imagine you want to buy but there seems to be only one type of scarfs available on Etsy from only one shop. I guess many potential buyers just gave up and moved to another on-line shops.

The issue of 'uber dominancy' was resolved in the end of October (at least on 10 first search pages for every search term) by using good old 'relevancy'. There is an engine that decides which item is relevant - accurate for the specific term that can be searched. 

People around Etsy Forums reports that now re-listed or recently listed items don't get theirs '5 minutes' in the searches. I confirmed it, only my oldest items, the ones with most 'hearts' and 'treasuries' get into first 10 pages of Etsy search.

So what can we, sellers, should do?

• There is no first page Treasury anymore, instead there is the Activity Feed. That means we need more hearts :) and treasuries, but with a place in the fist row (the first row is visible in the Activity Feed).
• We need links and backlinks (links to our items from blogs, pinterest, facebook and our internal links from our shop from one item to another)
• We need good SEO and good tags, as always.

But do we still need re-listing?

To get into the Activity Feed of our friends (ppl who favorited our shop or are following us) yes, But for now it seems re-listing won't get us into search result.

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This info I gathered around Etsy Teams and Forum. I hope it will help! If you wish to discuss or have some other news for us, please feel free to contact me or to leave a comment!

To learn more:

• CLUMPING - Etsy Forum topic
• SEO & RELEVANCY -  great Etsy Team
• PROMOTING - Etsy Team for promoting your items