I am Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing)
It got here to my consideration that my website doesn’t seem on DuckDuckGo search outcomes. Even when looking for “daverupert.com” instantly. After some digging, DuckDuckGo used to get their website index from Yandex, however now will get their website index from Bing and positive sufficient… I didn’t seem on Bing both.
To begin with… impolite. I’m the one individual I do know who truly makes use of Bing and I began utilizing DuckDuckGo on my Mac… they usually have the audacity —nay, the cowardice!— to shadow ban me and my contributions to the Internet!? I —a southern gentleman— take the best offense at this slighting and misconstruing of my character. I do declare.
search engine marketing isn’t considered one of my prime targets with this website, so initially I dismissed it. However that nerdsnipe shot a sign flare up in my mind that spun into thriller I wanted to resolve. I imply… there can be money from blogging. Certainly I’ve constructed some clout for my weblog over time… proper?
- I’ve been running a blog, nearly weekly, for over a decade…
- I co-host a considerably profitable net growth podcast…
- I’ve been again linked from in style blogs like CSS-Methods…
- I’ve been on hacker information a handful of occasions…
- And doubtless most essential… I present up on Google!
Why on earth would Bing not index my website in any respect? To resolve this, I took step one and signed up for Bing Webmaster Instruments to attempt to know what Bing is aware of about my website and positive sufficient: zero clicks, zero impressions, and nil listed pages for my website. Terrible.
The one clue I’ve to go off are some “Errors” in accordance with Bing’s Crawler. 100% of these errors are “lacking meta description”. That doesn’t appear to be an search engine marketing dealbreaker to me (I get a 91 on Lighthouse search engine marketing), however does Bing tremendous care about meta descriptions? Doesn’t appear to be I ought to have 0 out of 418 pages in my sitemap.xml although.
One “on the market” purpose I can suppose is that I exploit Amazon Affiliate hyperlinks on my Bookshelf and my /Uses web page and that triggers a shadow ban? I may see how that seems spammy and I query the ethics of Amazon hyperlinks typically myself, however what would I do with out these $ones of {dollars} that I make annually!? I preserve it round as a cash carrot incentive to encourage me to replace the bookshelf, however maybe it’s time I retire that monetization avenue.
In any case, a thriller is afoot… let the investigation start! I’ll publish a comply with up if I ever remedy this.