Ron Unz learns the hard way which of the two Internet giants actually matters with regards to site traffic:
I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, which seemed to underscore our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e}, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.
This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results….
Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} reduction in regular traffic.
I use DuckDuckGo myself, but one of the problems with it and the other alternative search engines is that they still seem to be tied into the Google system in various ways, so they don’t take proper advantage of Google’s self-hamstringing of their own technology.