3 Simple Steps to Improve Chinese SEO on Baidu
Founded in 2000 by the Chinese search scientist and entrepreneur Robin Li, Baidu is now China’s most popular search engine, taking a dominant ~80% share of the overall market of mainland China.
Just like Google, high rankings on Baidu is key to tapping the Chinese market. Below we investigate the differences between Baidu and Google, Here's what you need to know and 3 simple steps to improve your Chinese SEO.
1. Indexing
Google sets a lower threshold for indexing new websites and new pages than Baidu. The originality of the website content is a less important factor to Google than it is for Baidu and it also takes a longer time to be indexed by Baidu. Once your new website is indexed, ranking and traffic will be improved dramatically.
2. Weight
Baidu gives more weight to the homepage and relies largely on the quality of the homepage content for a good ranking. In comparison, Google gives even weight to each page of the website. This is why on the search engine results page, Google often provides ‘deeper’ or ‘inside’ pages, which is not the case for Baidu.
3. Updates
The frequent updating of your website content is useful to improve your ranking on both search engines. Constant updating on a regular basis is an overall effective and guaranteed way to improve your website ranking. However, some websites may still stay in the same position on Google if not regularly updated, but this is not necessarily the case for Baidu.
Link tactics for Chinese SEO
There are two kinds of links, inbound links and outbound links. The number of links is an important ranking factor for Chinese SEO regardless of the search engine.
However, there are some affecting points about links on Baidu you will need to know.
1. Quantity of the inbound links is more important than the quality
Gaining quality links (measured by how reputable and authoritative a site is) for Chinese SEO does not seem to play a big role in your website rankings on Baidu. A link from a reputable site seems to carry as much as weight as a link from a less reputable site.
2. Chinese links matter
Gaining links from other well-ranking, reputable and relevant Chinese sites is more important for Chinese SEO than getting links from English sites.
3. Baidu uses the outbound link quality
However the weight of this factor is hard to quantify. It is advised to link to other sites wherever it may be useful to the readers.
4. Ranking
With continued Chinese SEO it is possible for your website ranking to improve dramatically in Baidu, while Google prefers to improve the rankings gradually and steadily over a few months.
It is similar when it comes to punishment. Your ranking on Baidu may disappear in one night, but this seldom happens on Google unless serious cheating or black hat techniques are found on your website.
Pic (cc) Julien GONG Min on Flickr.
