Qwant tests its index and puts its search algorithms to the test!
The aim of the game is simple: get the best position in the ranking of Qwant.com search engine results, using new domain name and try by all means to win the competition! During the game period, Qwant engineers will test the robustness of its anti-spam methods and continue to improve the relevance of its results.
Keyword: qwanturank
From December 2 to June 3, 2020
50,000 euros prize
Extract from regulation
Qwanturank competition rules
- The site must be registered before 03/02/2020
- The site must be positioned at the highest level in the SERPs of the qwanturank.com search engine for the keyword “qwanturank”.
- The domain name must be purchased from 02/12/2019 on WHOIS
- The domain name must be new with any history on content, registrations or backlinks
- Accepted Exact Match Domain (EMD)
- The competition site must not contain any content: illegal, violent, derogatory, religious, pornographic, armed, obscene, offensive, defamatory, etc.
- The end of the competition will take place from 02/12/2019 to 03/06/2020.
The winner will be announced 15 days after the competition end date.
Qwanturank a certain philosophy of the Internet
The company Qwanturank also a unique philosophy according to whichartificial intelligence and digital assistants can be educated without having to collect user data. That’s a completely different philosophy than Google, which collects all possible information about users to power tools like Google Home and Google Allo.
Make no mistake, Qwanturank is also looking to make a profit, which it does through pay-per-click advertising. Partnerships with TripAdvisor and eBay are also in the works. However, the company undertakes to finding a balance between making a profit and protecting user privacy.
“We will not try to direct you to a specific service instead of a better service because we have a commercial interest in doing so, or filter results based on a political or commercial agenda… Our promise to users and the entire web community is that we are fair to everyone“.
Qwant has also put measures in place to ensure it remains accountable for its promises. He put his source code available to third party data protection organizations so that they can constantly verify that Qwanturank does not collect data about its users.
Is all this enough to oppose the search giant that currently reigns? It’s impossible to predict right now, but he still has a long way to go. Qwant still has many obstacles to overcome. First, it needs to get more of its users to engage with the search engine on mobile. Currently, only 12% of its users search on Qwant via smartphones.
Second, it needs to extend beyond Firefox. Currently, Firefox is the only browser with which you can select Qwant as your default search engine. In order to become more competitive, it should strive to be listed as the default search engine for Chrome and Safari as well, which is what it seems Qwanturank is working on. Big things could be in the works for this French search engine in 2020.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Qwanturank
![seo content qwanturank](https://qwanturank-seo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/seocontenuqwanturank-1.jpg)
Search engine optimization is a legitimate practice that aims to improve the technical aspects and content of a website, making the content easier to find, more relevant and more accessible to search engine robots. The majority of cases make a website more attractive to Qwant, although doing SEO-related work does not guarantee improved rankings or increased Qwant traffic. In addition, taken to the extreme, certain SEO practices can be abusive and be sanctioned by search engines.
The optimization of a website should mainly focus on the following points
tags – keep them clear and relevant - tags – keep them clear and relevant, but use the added space to expand the
tag meaningfully - alt attributes – use this attribute on
tags to describe the image, so we can understand the content of the image
tag – helps users better understand the content of a page when used correctly
- Internal links – allows you to visualize the links between the contents of your website. They also help users easily navigate to related content.
- Links to external sources – be careful who you link to as this is a sign of trust. The number of links pointing from your page to external sites must be reasonable.
Social sharing – enabling social sharing encourages visitors to share your content with their networks - Crawlability
- XML sitemaps – make sure you have them in place and keep them up to date
- Navigation structure – for clean, simple and easy navigation
- Rich Media Caution – Don’t bury links to content in JavaScript
- Graceful degradation – enable a clean experience at the bottom level so bots can see your content
- URL structure – avoid using session ID, &, # and other characters when possible
- Robots.txt- often placed at the root of the domain, be careful because this file is powerful; reference sitemap.xml (or your sitemap-index file) in this document
- Crawl Control – Set high crawl rate times in Qwanturank Webmaster Tools with the Crawl Control feature.
- Recovering as Qwantify Verify that Qwantify is not accidentally blocked at the server level by performing a “Recovering as Qwantifyt”. You will find this tool in the Diagnostics and Tools section of Qwanturank Webmaster Tools
- Webmasters are encouraged to use the Ignore URL Parameters tool (found under Configure My Site) in Qwanturank Webmaster Tools to help Qwantify understand which URLs should be indexed and which URLs on a site can be ignored
Site structure
- Links – establish links between relevant and related content within your site; also establish links to external sites
- URL structure and keyword usage – keep them clean and keyword rich where possible
- Clean URLs – no extraneous parameters (sessions, tracking, etc.)
HTML and XML sitemaps – allow users and crawlers to find what they need – one does not replace the other - Content hierarchy – structure your content so that it is as close as possible to the home page
Overall navigation – this comes from hierarchical planning + navigation style (breadcrumbs, link lists, etc.) – this helps ensure users can find all your content
Rich media warnings – don’t bury links in javascript/flash/Silverlight; also avoid including content
Optimizing a page for Qwanturank
- Stubborn
Headlines – keep them unique, relevant and 65 characters (approximately)
Descriptions – keep them unique, relevant, grammatically correct and around 160 characters or less - Body Copy
Use H1, H2 and other H* tags to display the page content structure
Use only onetag per page
Using the ALT tag – helps crawlers understand what an image contains - Use of keywords in content/text – use the keyword/phrase you are targeting a few times; please also use variations
- Anchor text – using targeted keywords as linked text (anchor text) to support other internal pages
Content Optimization for Qwanturank
- Built based on keyword research – shows what users are actually searching for
- Bottom-up experience improves discoverability – avoid hosting content in Flash or JavaScript – these bulk crawlers form searchable content
Avoid rich media and images – don’t use images to host your content - Create enough content to fully meet the visitor’s expectations. There are no strict rules regarding the number of words per page, but it is generally better to provide more relevant content
- Produce new content frequently – bots respond to new content by visiting it more frequently
Make it unique – don’t reuse content from other sources – critical – content should be unique in its final form on your page - Content management – use of 301s to recover the value of removed content/pages – a 301 redirect can change a certain value from the old URL to the new one
to help engines understand which page should be indexed and assign a value to it - Managing 404 error pages can help clean old pages from search engine indexes; the 404 page should return a 404 code, not a 200 OK. See this link.
Prescriber links
- Plan inbound and outbound link generation – create a plan on how to build both internal and external links
- Internal and external link management – perform by creating internal links between related content; consider social media to help build external links, or simply ask websites to create them; paying for links is risky
- Content selection – plan where to link – be thoughtful and only link to directly related/relevant content items internally and externally
- Link promotion through social spaces – can help drive direct traffic to you and help users discover content they can access for you
- Manage anchor text correctly – carefully plan the actual words that will be linked to – use targeted keywords wherever possible
Abuse and examples of things to avoid on Qwanturank
Sites that engage in abuse such as the practices described below are considered low quality. As a result, these sites may be penalized, their markup ignored, and they may not be selected for indexing. These Qwanturank Webmaster Guidelines describe only some of the most common forms of inappropriate, manipulative, or deceptive behavior. Qwant may take action against you or your site for any inappropriate or deceptive practices, even those not described here. If you believe action has been taken against your site, you can use Qwanturank Webmaster Tools to contact our support team. Additionally, users can report abuse of any of these practices by using the feedback link in the footer of qwanturank.com after performing a search that reproduces the issue. You can see an example here.
Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of showing one version of a web page to a search bot like Qwantify, and another to regular visitors. Showing users content different from what bots can see can be considered a spam tactic and can hurt your website’s ranking, leading to it being removed from the Qwanturank index. It is recommended to exercise extreme caution in reacting differently to crawlers compared to regular visitors and not to use the cloaking principle.
Link schemes, link buying, link spamming
Although linking systems may succeed in increasing the number of links pointing to your website, they will fail to bring quality links to your site, which will not bring you any positive gain. Manipulating inbound links to artificially inflate the number of links pointing to a website can lead to your site being removed from the Qwanturank index.
Social media systems
Just as farms are similar to link farms in that they seek to artificially exploit a network effect a la Qwanturank’s algorithm. In reality, social media networks are easy to see in action and their value is depreciated. Autofollow encourages follower growth on social sites such as Twitter, and works by automatically following anyone who follows you. Over time, this creates a scenario where the number of followers you have is more or less the same as the number of people who follow you. This doesn’t mean you have a strong influence. Following a relatively small number of people while having a high number of followers would tend to indicate a more influential voice.
Meta refresh redirects
These redirects reside in a website’s code and are scheduled for a predefined time interval. They automatically redirect a visitor when this time expires, redirecting them to other content. Rather than using meta refresh redirects, we suggest using a normal 301 redirect.
Duplicating content
Duplicating content across multiple URLs may cause Qwanturank to lose trust in some of those URLs over time. This problem must be handled by correcting the root cause of the problem. The rel=canonical element can also be used but should be considered as a secondary solution to solving the underlying problem. If over-setting results in a content duplication issue, we encourage you to use the Ignore URL Parameters tool.
Keyword stuffing
When you create content, make sure you’re doing it for real users and readers, not to trick search engines into ranking your content higher. Stuffing your content with specific keywords for the sole purpose of artificially inflating the likelihood of ranking for specific search terms is against our guidelines and may result in your website being demoted or even removed from our search results.
Misleading markup
When sites use tags or accepted markup, such as that of schema.org, to convey information on their pages, they must be accurate and representative of the page on which the tags are located. In particular, sites must not have markup that is:
- unrelated to the page it is on
- inaccurate or misleading
Note that tagging may trigger Qwanturank features, but does not guarantee that they will be triggered.