Disclaimer; I’m not looking for a VPN service, I already have one. I know TechRadar is not a great source too. I am simply doing research around VPNs in general.
I am just wondering why DDG is suggesting this link over a link without a reference? Is this “the blame” of DDG or Techradar? Trying to understand why this is the link being served over others. Appriciate any suggestions.
DDG is suggesting it because it has no custom rules setup to sanitized indexed URLs. Most likely it just means the first link to the article their crawler found has the referral tag in it.
But the plot thickens.
On Bing if I search “TechRadar shufliada” I see a few similar results, including other websites with the same site in the URL.
If I go to the website I find in their about page it says:
The goal of “Shufliada” is simple: to make the Ukrainian language more visible on the Internet/Google search.
Which while it could be innocent, almost suggests they’re intentionally backlinking popular websites in hopes their link to it is what gets indexed. IMO the blame doesn’t lie with either DDG nor TechRadar.
Very interesting indeed, thanks for sharing your findings!
Looks like a pretty benign Ukrainian website. An easy way to distinguish the Ukrainian language from Russian is to look for the letter i. It doesn’t exist in Russian Cyrillic. If you see both i and ë somewhere in the same sentence it is Belarusian since that language has both letters. Russian has ë, but not i, instead they have и for that sound.
There are probably better ways to tell based on grammar and whatnot but this is how I as an ignorant person distinguishes them.
Ah sorry about that, I could have double checked what language it really was. I closed it 2 secs after it had loaded and assumed it was Russian.
My suspicion is that DDG’s crawler looks similar enough to other crawlers and that’s the URL the crawler was provided.
I agree but this thing could be cleaned on DDG’s side.
Very interesting. I could get the same result in ddg, but not on bing. Also with quick testing around, couldn’t get the ref with searching other techradar article. Very alarmingly, it looks like shufliada dot com is some Russian website?
Edit: apparently it’s Ukrainian, not Russian.
