SEO problem with DuckDuckGo

[FoP]

We started our forum almost a year ago. We are on Xenforo cloud hosting and the first couple of months we used Xenforo's domain name "community.forum". We made a great start and it didn't take long to find ourselves on both Google and DuckDuckGo.

Then we decided to switch to our own domain name.

Google didn't blink. But we have been invisible on DuckDuckGo ever since. When I type in the full name of our forum, it gives me one or two results with the community URL, posts from November and December 2023. Or it will tell me "no results found."

From what I understand DuckDuckGo uses Bingbot and we have a steady stream of Bingbot bots constantly crawling our site. We also see the DuckDuckGo bot regularly. And yet we are invisible in their search engine.

Why is this happening and is there anything we can do?

 

[Old Nick]

DuckDuckGo is 0,6% of the search market.

 

[FoP]

That may be so, but it doesn't answer my question.

I use DDG and would like to know why we are invisible and what we can do about it.

 

[FoP]

So nobody has any idea why we are invisible in DuckDuckGo since the domain name switch?

If we get anything, it is old posts like these with the Xenforo domain name.

 

[Forsaken]

This is a known issue with DuckDuckGo, and really has nothing to do with XenForo itself.

Unless it has changed, DDG does not allow manual submission to update pages, whereas most major search engines do.

 

[FoP]

This is a known issue with DuckDuckGo, and really has nothing to do with XenForo itself.

Unless it has changed, DDG does not allow manual submission to update pages, whereas most major search engines do.

Yeah, I didn't think it was something on XF's end. I thought maybe we ourselves overlooked something, you know, got a page title wrong, have a dot or a slash in the wrong place, something, anything.

But what you're saying is that, basically, there is nothing we can do about it? Do you think that maybe in time, DDG will catch up?

And thank you for your reply.

 

[Forsaken]

Yeah, I didn't think it was something on XF's end. I thought maybe we ourselves overlooked something, you know, got a page title wrong, have a dot or a slash in the wrong place, something, anything.

But what you're saying is that, basically, there is nothing we can do about it? Do you think that maybe in time, DDG will catch up?

And thank you for your reply.

No, as far as I know DDG does not have any manual submission process, and relies solely on their indexing.

 

[FoP]

No, as far as I know DDG does not have any manual submission process, and relies solely on their indexing.

Understood. Thank you very much.

 

[briansol]

The only factual answer is to wait it out until it fixes itself. There's really nothing to do/nothing you can do.

 

[FoP]

The only factual answer is to wait it out until it fixes itself. There's really nothing to do/nothing you can do.

I understand. Thanks for the confirmation.

 

[James]

DuckGo automatically indexes websites, so you don't need to manually submit your website to it. However, you can help DuckDuckGo index your website correctly by submitting your sitemap to other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo uses the APIs from these other search engines, so submitting your site to them can help speed up indexing for your site on DuckDuckGo.

Try this maybe?

Thanks Gemini

 

[BikeGremlin]

What I'd do:

Get it sorted out with Bing - using Bing webmaster tools that you can log into using your existing Google Search Console Gmail account:
https://www.bing.com/webmasters
Then, DDG and most other search engines will get the hang of it, sooner if not later.

My experience with site being gone from Bing (and the other search engines relying on Bing, like DDG):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-overnight/

Relja

 

[FoP]

What I'd do:

Get it sorted out with Bing - using Bing webmaster tools that you can log into using your existing Google Search Console Gmail account:
https://www.bing.com/webmasters
Then, DDG and most other search engines will get the hang of it, sooner if not later.

My experience with site being gone from Bing (and the other search engines relying on Bing, like DDG):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/28530/microsoft-bing-serp-gone-overnight/

Relja

Thanks very much for the advice and for the links. Reading your experience at least tells me it's not something on our end. I will start using Bing webmaster to get at least some insight and hopefully some understanding of what's going on.

Much appreciate the help.

@James Thank you too, James.