This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
It came to my attention that my site does not appear on DuckDuckGo search results. Even when searching for “daverupert.com” directly. After some digging, DuckDuckGo used to get their site index from Yandex, but now gets their site index from Bing and sure enough… I didn’t appear on Bing either.
First of all… rude. I’m the one person I know who actually uses Bing and I started using DuckDuckGo on my Mac… and they have the audacity —nay, the cowardice!— to shadow ban me and my contributions to the Web!? I —a southern gentleman— take the highest offense at this slighting and misconstruing of my character. I do declare.
SEO isn’t one of my top objectives with this site, so initially I dismissed it. But that nerdsnipe shot a signal flare up in my brain that spun into mystery I needed to solve. I mean… there can be money from blogging. Surely I’ve built some clout for my blog over the years… right?
- I have been blogging, almost weekly, for over a decade…
- I co-host a somewhat successful web development podcast…
- I’ve been back linked from popular blogs like CSS-Tricks…
- I’ve been on hacker news a handful of times…
- And probably most important… I show up on Google!
Why on earth would Bing not index my site at all? To solve this, I took the first step and signed up for Bing Webmaster Tools to try to know what Bing knows about my site and sure enough: zero clicks, zero impressions, and zero indexed pages for my site. Awful.
The one clue I have to go off are some “Errors” according to Bing’s Crawler. 100% of those errors are “missing meta description”. That doesn’t seem like an SEO dealbreaker to me (I get a 91 on Lighthouse SEO), but does Bing super care about meta descriptions? Doesn’t seem like I should have 0 out of 418 pages in my sitemap.xml though.
One “out there” reason I can think is that I use Amazon Affiliate links on my Bookshelf and my /Uses page and that triggers a shadow ban? I could see how that appears spammy and I question the ethics of Amazon links sometimes myself, but what would I do without those $ones of dollars that I make each year!? I keep it around as a money carrot incentive to motivate me to update the bookshelf, but perhaps it’s time I retire that monetization avenue.
Anyways, a mystery is afoot… let the investigation begin! I will post a follow up if I ever solve this.
This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
daverupert.com | Sciencx (2023-01-14T21:13:00+00:00) I’m Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing). Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2023/01/14/im-shadow-banned-by-duckduckgo-and-bing/
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