What is DuckDuckGo Search Engine & How to Optimize Your Site in 2020

Although DuckDuckGo is a smaller search engine as compared to Google and Bing, it has rapidly evolved during its decade of operation. That’s why many people are concerned about optimizing their websites for this search engine as well. This is because DuckDuckGo has been gradually attracting the audience and generating more traffic to sites.

But what is DuckDuckGo search engine? And, how do you optimize your website for it? Read on to find out.

In this article, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about DuckDuckGo so that you can drive a lot of traffic to your site via this search engine.

What is DuckDuckGo Search Engine?

DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that was launched in 2008 by Gabriel Weinberg.  What sets it apart from Google and Bing is the fact that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track user searches or keep a record of them. Similarly, it doesn’t collect or share your personal info.

The company clearly mentions in their privacy policy that they think it’s kind of terrifying that people at search engines can view all user info. However, they are mainly concerned when these people either release user info to the general public or provide it to law enforcement. That’s why they came up with the idea of developing DuckDuckGo that promises complete anonymity and privacy.

Research suggests that most of of all web traffic worldwide is generated through mobile devices. As almost everyone owns a smartphone today, DuckDuckGo has also launched its app it is available in Playstore with the name “DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser” that functions the same as its desktop browser. You can search freely without worrying about privacy.

How DuckDuckGo Search Engine Makes Money?

So, are you wondering what is DuckDuckGo search engine doing to make money? According to the DuckDuckGo founders, they earn money by serving ads from the Yahoo-Bing search alliance network. Plus, a significant part of their earnings comes from eBay and Amazon affiliate commissions.

Although DuckDuckGo has around 1% of worldwide market share in the US, it has already processed more than 7.2 billion searches. This statistic clearly shows the massive increase in its search volume.

If the search engine continues to grow at this rate, it may soon become one of the top-most search engines all over the world. Traffic from DuckDuckGo is already showing an upward trend, and proper site optimization can attract more people to your site via this search engine.

However, keep in mind that DuckDuckGo is a hybrid engine that fetches results from other search engines and crowdsourced platforms like Wikipedia. As per the company’s executives, its ranking is a bit obscure and oblique as it uses underlying APIs’ ranking parameters and other factors to rank.

17 Steps to Optimize Your Website for DuckDuckGo

With people becoming increasingly concerned about their privacy online, DuckDuckGo may soon become their go-to search engine. That’s why it’s super important that you optimize your website for this search engine as well.

You must be wondering, “If DuckDuckGo is different from Google, what should I do to excel at its SEO?”

Well, the good news is that you don’t have to reinvent your entire SEO strategy. If you’re already following best SEO practices like producing useful content and ensuring your website is user-friendly, then you’re already on the right path.

Here are 18 steps to help you optimize your site for DuckDuckGo.

1. Update Your Site with Modern SEO Practices

Just like Google, DuckDuckGo is also committed to delivering the highest quality results to its users. This attitude means you must focus on ensuring that your website follows all DuckDuckGo SEO standards, such as:

• Your website should have a quick loading time, not exceeding 3 seconds.
• Your site should be responsive, performing well on mobile devices.
• The website design should look great on all screen sizes.
• Focus on technical SEO such as fixing complicated URLs, bad meta tags, poor site structure, etc.
• Optimize content to ensure it is error-free, well-written, and informative.
• Use keywords strategically to attract search traffic, leveraging intent-based keywords for optimum results.
• Ensure your site is optimized for other search engines like Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo because DuckDuckGo takes results from these platforms.
• Focus on the overall user experience by optimizing your web design for user-friendliness.

 

2. Refresh Your Local Keyword Strategy

Due to its strict privacy policy, DuckDuckGo doesn’t use geolocation data in getting search results. Although it keeps users anonymous, there are several implications from the perspective of SEO.

For instance, the local search results aren’t very precise. This means, if you’re a local company, you’ll need to make more efforts to show up in DuckDuckGo’s local search results. You’ll need to conduct more in-depth keyword research to truly understand where your users are located.

Suppose you’re a pizza restaurant based in California, US. There are several geo-specific keywords that you can include in your main keywords. For example, best pizza California, California pizza, California pizza restaurant, etc.

Now, if you’re wondering, “How do I find those keywords?”

You can use many online tools like Seed Keywords, Answer The Public, and Demographics Pro, which provide you with some good insight into how users are searching for your products/services.

 

3. Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are a vital part of DuckDuckGo SEO as well. Although there isn’t much info about their ranking process, the company does mention that the best way to get good rankings is to acquire backlinks from high-quality websites.

To ensure that you’re getting high-quality links, you need to consider the following things:

• Domain Authority (DA)

 
Domain Authority uses a scale of 0-100 to indicate quality. The higher you are on this scale, the more reliable and high-quality your site is.  For example, the Wall Street Journal has a DA of 94.

Although it is rare to acquire such high DA backlinks, any referring domains with a DA of 50+ can be valuable additions to your linking profile.

• Trust Flow

 
Created by Majestic, it helps estimate your website quality using a scale of 0 to 100. Generally, having a Trust Flow score of 40+ shows that you have a high-quality site.

• Relevance

 
The website providing the backlink should be relevant to your site. For instance, if you’re a digital marketing agency, getting a backlink from Neil Patel’s site is considered relevant as you both are in the marketing industry.

• Placement

 
The placement of backlinks also matters. It’s better to have editorial backlinks, meaning they’re embedded naturally in your content. Plus, it becomes more effective if the link is discussed in some way within the content.

Contrarily, a backlink buried in the footer or some other out-of-the-way place hints at a lower quality level.

• Framing

 
Framing the backlink with positive language increases the likelihood of the user to convert when they land on your site.

 

4. Optimize for DuckDuckGo’s Instant Answers

Providing the definitive answer to a user search query is the definition of success in search. In addition to landing on any page of the DuckDuckGo SERPs, you can also leverage their “Instant Answers” feature.

5. Set a Realistic Resource Allocation

To excel at DuckDuckGo SEO, you have to continue investing time and resources into it. Although this platform is growing fast, it’s still far behind Google, Bing, and Yahoo. So, avoid spending more than 5-10% of your total SEO efforts on this search engine alone.

However, if privacy is intrinsic to your company values or to your product itself (such as a privacy protection product), you may want to focus more on this platform.

For the majority of businesses, DuckDuckGo is a significant platform to explore for SEO. Yet, it is still a secondary priority to Google. But there’s no harm in boosting your results even in this search engine, right? So, keep creating engaging content and getting high-quality links.

6. Use Structured Data

Just like Google, DuckDuckGo also loves structured data. It saves the search engine from all the hard work of understanding your page by providing explicit clues about the content of your page.

 
Structured data is a standardized format for providing info about a webpage and classifying its content. The search engine then uses this info to understand your page content. By feeding structured data to DuckDuckGo, you save them time and provide data that crawlers can process way more quickly and with a better understanding of it.

7. Optimize for Bing and Yahoo

As DuckDuckGo pulls answers from Bing and Yahoo, you must follow best practices for these search engines as well. For instance, review your XML sitemaps. Ensure they are accurate and error-free, and submit them to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Additionally, use Bing Webmaster Tools to monitor your site health, crawl, and indexation performance, as well as identify optimization improvements.

 

8. Build Wikipedia-like Backlinks

Wikipedia is an open-source platform that allows higher control and customization to its users.  Perhaps, that’s the number one reason behind its low bounce rate. It takes care of the user with friendly site design and has a strong backlink profile.

DuckDuckGo relies on Yahoo as their primary source for fetching search results. And, both these platforms trust and value crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia. So it’s best to get links from Wikipedia for higher rankings. Even no-follow links from Wikipedia are considered important in the algorithm.

9. Repurpose Content

DuckDuckGo bots extract data from 400+ sources to provide the most accurate results. That’s because it knows more search engine users are searching for answers rather than generic links from different sites.

For instance, if somebody is looking for good leather jackets, they’ll find more relevant results on Amazon or fashion-related sites instead of a general search engine. Likewise, people searching for advice on coding will find more info on Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange. That’s why it is recommended to repurpose your content on these platforms.

Consider doing the following:

• Answer queries on sources such as Quora, Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, Reddit, etc. Content from these platforms is often ranked in DuckDuckGo SEO results as the search engine seeks answers rather than just offering links.
• Keep a good online presence on platforms like LinkedIn, Amazon, GoodReads, and beBee, especially if they’re relevant to your industry. For instance, a B2B company that shares regular informative content on LinkedIn will appear more frequently on DuckDuckGo.
• Repurpose your content to come up with short answers and share them on the various platforms. Often, your content will show up high in search engine results, even if your site itself doesn’t rank. This will bring new traffic to your site indirectly via channels like Quora or Stack Overflow.

 

10. Understand Your Audience

Users opt for DuckDuckGo because they want to maintain privacy. They don’t want the search engine to geotag them or track their internet activities. But, this alters how people approach to search on this search engine.

Typical keywords like ‘restaurant near me’ will not work as DuckDuckGo doesn’t know the location of the users.

Here are a few tips to help you understand your audience:

• Most search queries include a geo-qualifier in their keywords. For example, rather than searching ‘restaurant near me,’ they may search ‘restaurant on XYZ Street, DC.’ So, optimize your content accordingly.
• Searchers are mostly seeking answers on DuckDuckGo, so they’ll use question words such as ‘what,’ ‘why,’ ‘how,’ ‘when,’ etc.
• Leverage tools like Seed Keywords, Demographics Pro, and Answer the Public to better understand the kind of keywords you should use in your content.
• Keyword research in this platform is more exhaustive and multilayered compared to regular keyword research. That’s because DuckDuckGo uses a huge database of sources to fuel its search. You can only target the right audience via in-depth keyword research.

 

11. Submit Your Site to Other Search Engines

It may seem counter-intuitive, but a great way to rank in DuckDuckGo is to submit your website to other search engines. As it’s a hybrid search engine, DuckDuckGo crawls your website with its custom crawler DuckDuckBot as well as fetches info from 400+ existing directories, like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

12. Add Your Own Bang.

Bangs are the shortcuts that instantly direct you to the desired website whenever you enter them into the search bar. For example, !twitter, !eBay, !Reddit etc. The online biggies have shortened bangs, like !g for Google, !yt for YouTube, and !a for Amazon.

You can also add your search query in Bangs. For example, when looking for jackets on Amazon, you can write “!a jackets”.  Likewise, when searching ‘marketing’ on Wikipedia, you may write “!w marketing”. You can also submit your website’s bang.

13. Focus on Local Search

As DuckDuckGo doesn’t track its users, you don’t automatically know their location. The platform uses Geo:: IP to identify locations via IP addresses. This means your users have to mention exactly where they are if they want to get personalized results.

Therefore, you should include specific location info in your content and meta tags, including any colloquial or abbreviated terms that may be exclusive to your area. Add any major streets or intersections, any closeby landmarks or any other words searchers may use to state their location.

14. Create Engaging Social Media Profiles

DuckDuckGo allows users to view the social media profiles of others without leaving the search engine. For example, by searching @ndtvgadgets, you can see full profile info on the same page.

The same goes for Google+ and Gravatar. To search for a specific Twitter bio, you’ll have to search for the handle. For Google+, type G+ followed by the user name. For Gravatar, just type Gravatar, and then the name of the user.

There’s another really cool feature in DuckDuckGo. When using Google, you use the site: modifier to search for results within a specific website. Yet, you still have to open the link to view the results. With DuckDuckGo, you can use the website’s search functions.

For instance, when searching for somebody’s details on LinkedIn, you don’t have to open the website. Just enter, “!LinkedIn” +the person’s name, and you’ll see the LinkedIn search results page. This hack works with many sites. You can see the full list by just typing! In the DuckDuckGo search bar. So social media profiles and data should be updated as it can help in DuckDuckGo to fetch and search results.

15. Check Whether Websites are Down

If your website is not accessible somewhere then its time to think about that can’t be available for certain user. If you can’t access a site, it’s best to check if it is not accessible from everywhere or just on your computer. Use sites like isup.me. Or, you can simply search on DuckDuckGo with keywords like, “Is  xyz.com down for me.” This feature will help you optimize your site if it is down somewhere.

16. Leverage its Strong Privacy Policies

DuckDuckGo keeps your browser extensions and apps permanently secure. It comes with a built-in tracker blocker that prevents ad networks from gathering information on your online activities. It detects all possible hidden networks like Ad networks supported by Google and Facebook and instantly blocks them. You can also select which ads you want to view.

17. Advertise Differently

Before launching a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, keep in mind that customization and control won’t be the same. The main motive behind DuckDuckGo is to protect users and their privacy from advertising exploitation. However, their ad campaigns run through Bing and Yahoo. As DuckDuckGo is a relatively small search engine, you’ll have very little competition.

What Makes DuckDuckGo SEO Different?

As discussed already, there are no tools to help you understand how to optimize for specific users. This is because the platform doesn’t collect user data. Also, any tricks and spamming will not work with this search engine as it tries to focus exclusively on quality and user experience/demand.

Here’s what makes DuckDuckGo SEO different:

• It offers more support to open-source websites than Google. So try to get links from Wikipedia.
• Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo does the page-turning for you, which means that you get search results on what seems like one continuous page.
• DuckDuckGo doesn’t track search history. For instance, you search for ‘shoes.’ When you click on a site, your current search engine may tell the website that you searched for shoes and landed on its page. As a result, you may get ads about shoes on other sites you visit. DuckDuckGo uses the same kind of model but doesn’t return personalized ads.

 

Wrap Up

So, what is DuckDuckGo search engine? It’s a unique rival to Google and Bing that focuses heavily on privacy. As of today, millions of daily queries go through this platform. This means if you aren’t optimizing for it yet, you’re missing out on a great opportunity of directing quality traffic to your website.

You can maximize the potential of DuckDuckGo search engine when you read our blog to understand the key metrics to drive massive traffic to your website.