Duck Duck Go has been growing its daily searches exponentially. Just take a look at this chart.
In this post, we take a look at Duck Duck Go.
Duck Duck Go Lists
One of the first things that is interesting to note about Duck Duck Go is their lists. Arranged alphabetically, these lists are essentially categories of content that actually rank pretty well in the Google search engine. Here we see an example of the search engine optimization list.
Now once you click into one of these links you will see subcategories at the top. In addition, you will see normal looking search query listings lower on the page. But what was really interesting to me, is if I clicked on one of the subcategories, many of them were rel canonicaled to a different area. For example, if you click on app store optimization there is actually a rel canonical on that page pointing at their internet marketing category.
My guess is, the SEO who works at Duck Duck Go got a little nervous about thin content and the fact that they are scraping Wikipedia content at the top of these list.
We can see that the Duck Duck Go rankings in the United States have only dropped in Google. So maybe they were slapped with a Panda penalty at some point, who knows.
Duck Duck Go Images
Duck Duck Go also has an area to rank images. Unfortunately, there is not webmaster tools for Duck Duck Go so you cannot submit an XML sitemap of any kind.
When clicking on the number one image in the search engine optimization category it took me to a broken page. When I clicked on the second URL, it took me to a page that had no rankings in SEM Rush (as far as Google is concerned). When reviewing the URL in Majestic SEO, it did have 56 backlinks and 8 referring domains. But overall, the external signals were low. That being said, the onsite optimization for that image was spot on. Everything from the page URL to the image URL to the alt text all had the exact term search engine optimization in it. This was the case for 80% of the other images I reviewed in this image list.
Searching in Duck Duck Go
Here we see an example search for places to eat in San Diego. Here we see images at the top, a couple ads, two Yelp listings, two thrillist listings, two Union Tribue articles and a San Diego magazine article.
The entire first 3 pages is lists and categories. Not a single restaurant. This shows the importance of getting on third party sites in Duck Duck Go. It is actually similar in Google, but the places listings are at the top of the page.
Duck Duck Go has an infinite scroll feature, so you don’t need to go from page to page.
Icons, Related Topics and Regions
Here we see the general layout of the page and the ads.
It should be noted, there is also an option for more results that appears when you hover over the listing.
Duck Duck Go also pulls an icon for each search listing. If you don’t have one, you just get an arrow.
Duck Duck Go also has the Videos and the Products tabs.
The further you scroll to the right the less reviews there are on the products. Showing one of the main factors.
Duck Duck Go also has a places tab when they recognize a local query. However, they do not seem to pull from Google, just from Yelp.
The region tab has all the major countries to choose from. Simply select one to filter by that area.
How to Rank Well in Duck Duck Go
If you ask Duck Duck Go, this is what they say verbatim.
Now, Duck Duck Go does pull from a variety of sources directly. This makes it all the more important to be present on sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Yandex, Yelp and Bing. These are some of the main places you need to be present.
In addition to this, it helps to become an official site.
Duck Duck Go is know for not delivering exactly on what the user searches for, but also trying to provide a little variety. For example, if I were trying to get a page to rank for Ignite Visibility I would use terms like.
- Ignite Visibility
- Krish Coughran
- John Lincoln
- SEO Company San Diego
- Search Engine Land Writer
- UCSD Extension Teacher
This strategy will be even more powerful for larger sites. But Duck Duck Go has the ability to connect similar queries and match them together, so adding similar keywords to the page can help better your chances of showing up for a term.
Outside of this, many people recommend the following optimization strategies.
- Link to Wikipedia and Yelp directly to strengthen the relationship between your sites
- Try to get a Wikipedia page if possible and get a Yelp page 100%
- Get quality links
- Make sure your content has facts, statistics and isn’t too short
- Make sure your site is fast and mobile ready
When reviewing Duck Duck Go, our rankings are fairly similar to that in Google (at least for Ignite Visibility). However, as the search engine grows it is a good idea for us all to be taking a closer look at it. From what we can see, there are some core elements to the Duck Duck Go algo that are very easy to determine (Wikipedia for one)… I hope this post was helpful.
