iTunes search can't find me

[stingpin]

Using WordPress 3.4.2 and PowerPress 4.0.4. I cannot figure out why iTunes cannot find my podcast when searching on any keywords, except the title of the program. It seems that iTunes is not finding the information I've entered in the "iTunes" tab of the Blubrry PowerPress Settings.

Looking at my feed itself in the browser, I see that, rather than displaying my iTunes program subtitle or summary, it instead shows the "tagline" from the WordPress general settings! Still, the text from the iTunes Program Summary does display in iTunes -- but an iTunes search for words that appear in that summary does NOT bring up my show, nor does a search for any of my "iTunes Program Keywords".

It's worth noting that much of this text is in Japanese. I had found with Feed Validator that there was an encoding problem with the feed, but I fixed that problem a couple of days ago, and the search problem persists. (including for Keywords that are in English)

I'm out of ideas. Any suggestions?

[angelo]

You may want to contact Apple regarding non-English searches. But I do know that primary search only uses your title and keyword fields. Episode search may dig deeper, but that is an Apple question they can answer better than I can.

[stingpin]

Tried that today, but Apple just said they can't support podcasts, and threw me to the Apple forums. One guy tried to help me there, but hasn't hit on anything so far.

[angelo]

What is the URL to the feed you submitted to iTunes, and what is the link to your program on iTunes?

[stingpin]

The feed submitted to iTunes:
http://www.machigai.com/wordpress/?feed=podcast

My show on iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/machigai-podcast/id191675328

[stingpin]

If you search for "Machigai Podcast", an episode title ("093 TAG"), or a member of the cast ("Yuki Sukehiro"), iTunes will find my show. But if you search for, say, 英会話 (English conversation in Japanese), it will find other shows, but not mine. Even though it's in my keyword field AND in my podcast description.

[angelo]

It appears iTunes is not using Keywords anymore for search. One thing that I discovered though is when you search for "英会話", the results in iTunes only list podcast programs where "英会話" is in the title. iTunes doesn't display the full title in many of the programs listed, you have to click each program to see the full title to see the pattern.

My advice to you is add "英会話" to the blog/podcast title.

[stingpin]

Interesting. Perhaps they decided people were abusing the keywords, a la metatags?

They seem to be looking at episode titles, too. Take a look at this one:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/katakuzurajio./id253835740

The fifth episode down, the one that starts "Lesson 6", has 英会話 in the episode title. Funny thing is, this isn't even an English conversation podcast! It's comedy! Anyway, it looks like episode titles are also good.

Thanks.

[angelo]

Again, we are not Apple, so I can only speculate what is happening. I know that in our system, we index keywords using a dictionary, English in our case. As I said before, assuming iTunes does the same for the English language site, any non-English words in the keywords would not be indexed. Keywords usually ahve to match exactly, and some systems use a minimum word length of 3-5 characters for keywords to be indexed, so there could be a number of reasons why the keyword does not work.

[stingpin]

OK. Well, keywords in English are also not helping, so I don't think the Japanese is the issue. "English" and "mistake" are keywords, but a search for them doesn't bring up Machigai Podcast.

[angelo]

Then it sounds like the only data they use now for search is the title.

[stingpin]

I just changed my title, so we'll see if that helps!

[stingpin]

It's been over 24 hours since I changed the podcast title, but iTunes is not reflecting the change yet. I want to make sure I changed the right thing.

As far as I can tell, iTunes is getting the show title from WordPress > Settings > General. That's what I changed. I don't find anything in the PowerPress settings for filling in the title of the podcast. Am I missing something?

[angelo]

iTunes can take a while. I see the change on the iTunes web site, but it's not reflected in the iTunes directory yet, as they apparently maintain them separately. Usually titles and image changes take 3-7 days as of recent.

[stingpin]

I see my chang in iTunes, but a search for 英会話 still doesn't find me. Does it take time for the search tool to catch up??