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I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

daverupert.com

161–170 of 205 posts

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should you do when another site copies your content like this then?

Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked). The more sophisticated…

> strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from

That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely.

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#162
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This… this is not a logical interpretation of shadow ban, at best it’s a random guess. Interpretation implies some understanding of the data

What makes "invisible to everyone but you" a more "logical" interpretation of "shadow ban" than "banned but didn't tell you"? Are shadows invisible to everyone but you?

When a user is (normal) banned, they are normally told and their access/ability is restricted.

When a user is shadow banned they are normally not told they are banned and are still able to access and perform functions. I think this secrecy is where the word "shadow" comes in. The user is in the dark about the ban...

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#163
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site?

> i assume you have >0 backlinks to the site? I always wondered about this. What exactly is a backlink, and why should I need one?

Backlinks are links to your website used by algorithms like PageRank^1 to weight how important your site is. Roughly speaking, more links, especially from sites with their own high pagerank = higher rank.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various things from addressing the problem directly if possible (block the IP address range they use to scrape your content with, insert JavaScript to strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from), to changing their search engine behavior (canonical meta tags, contact the search engine to let them know, build up links on the web to make your site higher ranked). The more sophisticated…

> strip the content client-side depending on the domain it's being served from That would almost certainly be regarded as a "doorway page"[1], resulting in you getting manually ranked downward or even deindexed entirely. [1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...

You may have misunderstood, it doesn't have anything to do with doorway pages which are about presenting extra highly redundant content.

I'm talking about, if content on legitimatesite.com includes JavaScript that detects if it's being loaded on any other domain, then erase the entire article's HTML from the DOM.

Obviously this is easily defeated by stripping out JavaScript, so it's useful only for very primitive mirroring.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#165
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty obscure slang, I'm American and have never heard it.

It's very common.

Is it very common?

If I search "Beej" on Google without Safesearch enabled, I get 14.3M results, if I turn on the Safesearch filter, it still returns 14.3M results.

If I repeat the same experiment with "blowjob", it's 1.5B results vs 23M.

If I search for "Beej" on Bing with SafeSearch Off, I get 2,840,000 results, while with Safesearch on Strict, I get 2,800,000 results. I couldn't search for "blowjob" at all with Safesearch on Strict.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#166
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This… this is not a logical interpretation of shadow ban, at best it’s a random guess. Interpretation implies some understanding of the data

What makes "invisible to everyone but you" a more "logical" interpretation of "shadow ban" than "banned but didn't tell you"? Are shadows invisible to everyone but you?

I didn’t say they were (though I think so.) I said it wasn’t the more obvious “logical” interpretation.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we’ve gotten to the point where Bing and DDG need disrupted. The answer is that these companies are ruining things not that DNS and simple search is wrong

I’ve moved from DDG to Kagi.com. It’s paid, but no ads and no incentives to remove legit sites that I’ve seen.

I have as well and have gotten at least one coworker to do the same.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#168
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very common.

Is it very common? If I search "Beej" on Google without Safesearch enabled, I get 14.3M results, if I turn on the Safesearch filter, it still returns 14.3M results. If I repeat the same experiment with "blowjob", it's 1.5B results vs 23M. If I search for "Beej" on Bing with SafeSearch Off, I get 2,840,000 results, while with Safesearch on Strict, I get 2,800,000 results. I couldn't search for "blowjob" at all with Sa…

It's generally spoken, not typed out.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish there was a button in the browser that I could click to report the page as spam to all search engines. The spammers would use that offensively to destroy the original content creators with that system

The way it should work is that the spam reports are used only to filter the results you see.

Seems reasonable. If enough human-like users (with gmail accounts, yt activity, and other indicators) ban a particular site enough times that should offer some evidence that it's low quality too.

Re: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

#170
post #121
post #106

I have exactly this problem. Beej's Guide to Network Programming is indexed just fine. Beej's Guide to C won't index. The automated tool says it's in violation of some unnamed rule, but I can't figure out which. There's zero SEO, tracking, or ads, and the content is educational and G-rated. All the other guides index just fine. I asked for a review and they came back with the same ambiguous message. Eventually I just…

Could it be due to some overly zealous prude filter and the unfortunate coincidence that "beej" is American slang for blowjob (oral sex)?

I've definitely considered that. (I'm well-aware of my nickname's connotations, and I just don't care. :) )

But they index everything else on my site and don't prude out over that...

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