Qwanturank, our tests

qwanturank test

Since the beginning of December, Qwant launched a SEO competition on request “qwanturank“. A month later, it is possible to release the first analyzes based on a certain number of tests implemented for some time. The first conclusions are surprising to say the least.

qwanturank test

As we know, the French search engine Qwant has been organizing a SEO competition on the query “qwanturank” since December 2. I explained on this occasion and in a previous article the objectives, in my opinion, of this engine and also why I did not participate in it. I have also explained several times that this competition could be an opportunity to test some things and see how the engine which has been the subject of an avalanche of criticism throughout a very difficult 2019.

Over the days, I looked at the results of the competition and here are my few (modest) conclusions, four weeks after its launch.

Bing independence: it’s not a given!

First of all, as explained above, Qwant has faced a lot of criticism since its inception, with some claiming that the engine had neither its own index nor its own algorithm, but was more or less dependent of those of Bing (an agreement with Microsoft’s search engine that was not revealed when Qwant was launched, but was finally revealed some time later). It therefore seemed interesting to me to do a test on this subject and during this competition.

I therefore put the following directives in the robots.txt file of the site, prohibiting crawling by Bingbot (the Bing robot) of my first article on the Qwanturank competition:

User agent: bingbot
Disallow: https://qwanturank-seo.com

In this case, there are two possibilities:

Either Qwant has its own crawler, its own index and its own algorithm and the article would be indexed by the engine without problem, without any connection with Bing.

Either Qwant uses Bing technology and the article, being prohibited for this engine, will not appear in its SERPs.

[Qwanturank] Following the publication of the article, the queries and clearly indicated that the link in the Qwant SERP came from Bing, since the message “We would like to describe here but the site you are viewing does not give us the possibility that it “appears”. No ambiguity possible here, the result was well provided by Bing:[Qwanturank]

At the same time, it was not entirely surprising: we can imagine that the Bing robot is more “alert” than that of Qwant and that once the page has been browsed by Qwantify (the Qwant robot), the article then found its place in the SERP… Except… No! 3 weeks after the publication of the article, it never seems to have been crawled by the Qwant robot or in any case indexed (which is the desired goal), and the result “by Bing” is still present in the SERP qwanturank .

Results of this test

These are the results from Bing that are displayed in Qwant, from the start, for the queries tested.
Qwant never indexed the article, even though its bot was allowed to do so.
Note: I did not do the same test in robots.txt with this article

Also for your information, for the past few days, Google seems to have “taken into account” the competition request and is now showing everything that looks like “blue links” when entered. This is certainly one way to fight against this type of competition…

Testing the Qwant algorithm: competition is clearly uncorrelated

Only around fifty blue links are displayed, then no more natural results.

Only home pages are offered, and no internal pages

The results are extremely static over time, with very little change:
To go further, I took the test to score, every day between Christmas and the beginning of January (assuming that given the financial stake, the SEOs participating in the competition will not be unemployed during this period, just like robots and algorithms which do not know ski holidays and public holidays), the positions of the “Top 10” of SERPs Qwant on the competition specific request. Here are the results:

It’s quite clear: apart from a slight “crossover” on the 2nd and 3rd place between 2 URLs for 3 days, no change has occurred in the SERP for over a week! No “serious” engine can return this type of SERP in the long term on a given query, especially for a SEO competition where changes are, by nature, incessant. It is impossible… The result seems to be confused with a “wart” type classification, outside of any classic “engine” algorithm, to the point that many people made fun of it on Twitter, calling it “work”. manual and human “without any algorithmic input or automation.

In any case, it seems obvious that the results returned have absolutely nothing to do with those that a “normal” engine should provide on such a query in this type of context, to an almost caricatured point. In this case, isn’t this a touchstone for those who accuse Qwant of not having its own technology? We can ask ourselves the question… I admit that I was quite surprised by the results returned by the engine and their “simplicity” on the request targeted by the competition…

In any case, it is clear that if we wanted to test the Qwant “engine” algorithm on this query, this would absolutely not be possible, the SERPs of this competition being obviously uncorrelated from the “classic” SERPs. This is unfortunately what I feared in my previous article…

Conclusion: Is Qwant shooting itself in the foot with this competition?

This competition therefore gave me the opportunity to do some tests on Qwant, which I report in this article. Following this analysis, I really come to ask myself the question of whether Qwanturank is not a bullet shot in the foot of the search engine, because my conclusions are unfortunately edifying:

the engine never crawled my first article and only displayed the – redacted – version provided by Bing from the beginning.
The search results on the competition request are a wart that has nothing to do with the “normal” processing of SERPs carried out by a “serious” search engine.
Isn’t this a godsend for people who have been criticizing Qwant for some time?

In other words, what can be positive for Qwant based on the analysis of the first weeks of this competition? No matter how hard I search, I have to admit that I can’t find anything. Suddenly, I stop my tests there because I don’t see any real interest. Moreover, it will still be said that I am shooting at an ambulance unfortunately already very badly, if we are to believe the numerous articles in the French press which have been published about it during the last quarter. However, I was honestly very interested in these first experiences. And I would have been the first to be happy to draw positive conclusions, which would have shown me that the engine had learned lessons from the past and the enormous communication and strategy problems present from the start. Alas, it seems that it is nothing, quite the contrary…

I hope that others besides me will do this type of analysis (or others) by the end of the competition and that they will draw other conclusions, more favorable to Qwant. For my part, I think I have sufficiently tested and analyzed this competition. Good luck to its participants!

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