Issues with DuckDuckGo

[Cyril TechWebsites]

Hey, guys!
I want to ask you for help:
I have some problem with traffic from DuckDuckGo. It suddenly dropped in January and never recovered. I've didn't do any changes.
Here is a screenshot:
[imgur.com...]

Does someone has idea - what could be the reason for such penalty from DuckDuckGo? I would be very appreciate for help or thoughts. Thanks!

[lucy24]

what could be the reason for such penalty

Let’s talk about what the phrase “begging the question” means.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Since DuckDuckGo is entirely made up of Bing and Yandex results, your best best is to look at those search engines and decide which one was and is now not giving you traffic.

[lucy24]

DuckDuckGo is entirely made up of Bing and Yandex results

What happens if Bing and Yandex disagree? I thought DDG (until recently) used other people's crawl data but then applied their own algorithm.

[brotherhood of LAN]

What happens if Bing and Yandex disagree? I thought DDG (until recently) used other people's crawl data but then applied their own algorithm.

They do use other people's data. Their bot fetches home pages to find out where favicons are to display on SERPs

I've never heard of manual intervention or a site not ranking that existed within the upstream results. If that were the case they'd have to grab more results than they're displaying via the BING api etc. It might happen but I'd sooner wager on it being one of the upstream engines not featuring a site.

[lucy24]

I don't see how a particular robot's crawl data gets to be equated with a particular search engine's algorithmic results. They're entirely separate things.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I'm not sure why you're wanting to confuse who crawls what, DDG gets its data from Bing and Yandex. Their crawlers do their thing, their APIs provide the results. There's only so much a meta search engine can do with said results.

[tangor]

DDG brings their "privacy" side to the biz. Their catalog is Bing ... and kudos in that regard.

To the OP ... January saw a number of changes (or upcoming changes) re GDPR and other things. Could you have been caught in that? Not meant to be ugly, but so many sites crying foul in the past have proved to be skirting the edge of propriety or being a bit disingenuous to their users---and caught by the SEs. NOT SAYING OP is doing anything wrong, just remarking all too often quick-gelt or bad decisions can result in negative results DOWN THE LINE.

[NickMNS]

DDG has also mentioned in a past blog post that they use links from Wikipedia as a ranking signal. Maybe your competitor deleted some Wikipedia links to your site.

[NickMNS]

Here is the link support my post above:
[webmasterworld.com...]

As side note, trying to find a reference now on DDG to the article I originally linked to in the linked thread was not easy. I found it by landing on a post that @rustybrick had written on SER that referenced the link that I posted here a few month ago. I love the SER WW circular reference, this time it proved really useful.

Here is the link to SER just to keep it spinning...
[seroundtable.com...]

[Cafeine]

That looks more like an analytics problem.
Is the drop on January 22? Since this date, DuckDuckGo is reported as organic in GA. See [twitter.com...]
Do you see the traffic in the source / medium report under duckduckgo / organic ?