Chinese Baidu: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in China | Fili’s World

25 Mar, 2007 in China, Taiwan by Fili
Tags: China, Taiwan

Chinese Baidu: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in China

The SEO rules for the Chinese Internet market (Baidu and Google China) are a bit different than that of any other country. The Internet market works differently due to various social, political and technological reasons. It’s quite remarkable that Google China has so far failed to take over the Chinese search engine market which is still dominated by Baidu - maybe the only company in the world still beating Google in their own niche.

Most of the websites’ incoming traffic comes from search engine queries, so Google is extremely important for any site out there that’s interested in getting traffic, and the Internet is full of SEO experts with advice on how to help Google better understand your site, hopefully resulting in higher Google rankings and increased incoming traffic.

Baidu’s dominance in the enormous Chinese online market holds a whole new world of challenges and opportunities for websites. Asking online-colleagues and browsing through the Internet it’s quite surprising how little information is available on the topic in English. Most western SEO professionals I know assume that Baidu’s behavior is just the same as Google’s, but I’ve always felt that’s just the easy response and probably quite far from the actual truth. I had a chance to rethink this subject while discussing "English Taiwan : The websphere, the blogosphere, traffic, SEO and the need for a profound change" and the lacking connection between the Chinese and English blogospheres in Taiwan and China. I was happy to see the wonderful Onemanbandwidth: An American Professor in China promising to discuss his SEO experiences in China on "SEO CHINA" :

As many of you know I have been doing search Engine Optimization and Search engine Marketing for about six years. [...] This will be the start of an Internet Marketing Tutorial for those doing general cyber-business or blogging in China.

SEO services in the U.S. and China are vastly different. Chinese companies usually charge by the keyword. A top ten listing for a “cool word” (one with low result returns in Google) might cost you 8,000 RMB a word per year; a “hot” word/term like English School China with 85,000,000 returns could cost you 20-30,000 RMB per year. If that were the case for me I would have someone ghost-writing this blog and I would be having my feet massaged in first-class on Singapore Air.

This could turn out to be a great project, starting a western discussion on China SEO technics and tips, but I’d like to see that focus more on what’s unique for the China market. So, although I’m not a big SEO expert, especially not when it comes to SEO in China, I thought I’ll share the little that I do know about China oriented SEO with special reference to Baidu’s search engine.

-

Content

Baidu is extremely sensitive to some information, so totally avoid mentioning or writing adult content, pornography, or Chinese government forbidden keywords. Having any of those will not only affect the page the content is on but also the entire website.

Content description

Naturally, optimize your pagetitles, your headings and try to achieve optimal keyword density for important keywords in your website pages (5-8%), same as Google.

Links

Anchor-texts for incoming links are, like in Google’s case, a very important SEO factor, but it seems Baidu attributes a little more importance to internal anchor-texts. Note that unlike Google, Baidu still doesn’t have a very advanced authority mechanism, so there’s less importance to where your anchor-text is coming from, and you can imagine the consequences of this problem.

Content language

Since we’re targeting China, it’s important that we have Chinese text, and to be more precise - Simplified Chinese text in the right encoding. Not many Chinese search in English (although I was getting quite a few Baidu hits in both English and Chinese for posts like "the story behind the Chinese zodiac"). It doesn’t have to be much, say a sub-heading of the title in Chinese.

Content translation

Consider using automatic tools to translate your blog/website as those might give you a better first exposure in the Chinese market than you think. Some bloggers are using automatic translations with self-reported relative success, like quickonlinetips.com and it’s advisable to read his tips for automatic wordpress blog translation and the importance of caching to avoid being locked off by translation services. Some of the big blogs even have Chinese bloggers manually translate their content to target the Chinese audience.

Site location and domain name

If you are opening a Chinese website/mirror/translated-mirror, then you should know that it seems Baidu would love you more if you have a China domain, like .com.cn or .cn, or if you’re hosted in China. Domains and webhosting in China are amazingly cheap, though extremely slow for outside access.

Translated SEO parameters

Make sure it’s not only content and text that are written or translated in Chinese, but also other important SEO parameters like the image "alt" field that describes the images in your blog etc…

Metadata

… That’s also true for metadata, namely metatags like keywords and description. While Google lowered the importance of this factor to almost nothing, Baidu still loves metadata.

Crawlable site

Make sure your site is crawlable by using a text browser like Lynx.

Site structure

Tweak your .htaccess and try to avoid 403/404/defected-links pages. Note that Baidu doesn’t care as much for robots.txt and content duplication.

Site submission

Submit your site to Baidu through http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html . Baidu is a bit slow to start crawling the site, so hang in there and wait patiently.

Feed submission

Although Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed on Google’s sitemaps as a standard, Baidu has something else with what has been translated as "Baidu’s News Protocol" :

采用了《互联网新闻开放协议》，就相当于网站的新闻被搜索引擎订阅，通过百度——全球最大的中文搜索引擎这个平台，网民将有可能在更大范围内更高频率地访问到您网站的新闻，进而为您的网站带来潜在的流量

The "open Internet news" is equivalent to a website’s news search engine subscription. Through the world’s largest Chinese search engine Baidu, you can have greater exposure with a higher frequency of visits to your website’s news, thus increasing the potential for traffic to your web site.

So, you’ll have to adjust things a bit to fit their standard and submit it to : http://news.baidu.com/newsop.html . If you’re using Wordpress then you might want to check out Hong Xiaowan’s Studio’s The Wordpress Plug-in of Baidu News Protocol with the detailed instructions on how to set it up. I haven’t tried this, but I’ve heard it’s pretty straightforward.

Keyword research

Obviously, keyword research using Google’s tools won’t help you much, and you’ll need to use what Baidu has to offer. You can start off by checking Baidu trends on Baidu Index. Here’s an example for the keyword 以色列 (Israel)) :

Baidu also provides live updates for Baidu’s top keywords :

There used to be a keyword analysis tool for Baidu, but the links I once used don’t seem to work anymore. You can also use Overture’s Chinese keyword suggestions tool as well as SEOQuake Firefox extension that displays Baidu stats on search results.

-

That’s my quick guide on Baidu SEO. Other general SEO tips can be found on fiLi’s tech. If you’ve got some more quick tips and SEO info on Baidu, I’m interested - comment here or write me.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to the full RSS Feed

Related Posts

48 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

Lonnie | March 25th, 2007 at 9:31 am #

Fantastic!
Can I reference you in the next installment?
fiLi | March 25th, 2007 at 11:25 am #

Sure, I’d like that.
Alex | March 25th, 2007 at 11:30 am #

An interesting post.

I’m more up on the legal and technical aspects, rather than SEO. Between yourself, Loonie and pandapassport.com I’m sure to learn something.

Regarding .CNs and incase any viewers don’t know - they are available for purchase from some Western domain providers (about $25/year, not included in the recent 1RMB special offer).

Hosting - Don’t host in mainland China unless you absolutely have to - meaning delivering fast high bandwidth sites to the general populace. Hosting anything approaching a blog or news site in mainland China requires an ICP licence, which requires a legally registered entity and permission from the relevent government department. Hosting in HK is better - one can benefit from proximity to China (low latency and high bandwidth) and not be subject to such stringent legal regulation
Alex | March 25th, 2007 at 11:33 am #

Oh, and for shameless self-promotion, I made a post just yesterday about Chinese language encoding formats!
fiLi | March 25th, 2007 at 11:45 am #

That’s important advice, thanks.

Could you give an example for what you consider technical and legal aspects? I know a few Israeli web2.0 Israeli companies operating in China I can ask on the topics you’re interested in.
Alex | March 25th, 2007 at 12:23 pm #

I mean… legal/government regulations/technical regarding setting up a China-related website, rather than China SEO of which I know practically nothing. Stuff like latency, policy announcements.

Just bring together and publishing a kind of all-there-is -to-know thing, of which SEO is a part, so stuff like this and what Lonnie/Rick are doing is gold.
Gemme | March 27th, 2007 at 11:08 am #

Great overview Fili. Thanks.

There are a couple of things I like to add/comment. I especially liked the firefox plugin you mentioned. One caveat I found here, is that they display their own advertising on top of the results but useful nevertheless.

As Alex already pointed out domains can be bought through western domain providers and I would actually suggest to always take that route. Besides that it can be a pain in my experience to deal with Chinese registrars, I found that moving your domain to another registrar can be a costly affair as they charge extra for this, and they also require additional paperwork to have this happen. There are plenty of good western registrars that give you the flexibility you need and make you less dependent.

Hosting is another issue Alex pointed out and his advice to avoid it unless you have to is spot on. One thing to keep in mind is to never host and have your domain registered with the same provider. If you ever want to change host you will be more flexible.

You mention that meta tags have hardly any value anymore in Google these days. As far as they keyword meta tag goes, you’re right, and as far as the meta description goes, if there is any weight to it, it will be light. Having said that, using a meta description serves also other goals in Google.

The meta description is often used by search engines to be displayed in the search results.

If not for the ranking value, there is marketing value into having a readable piece of text under the title in the search results and not some garble that the SE think it’s about.

For example, a search for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=filination&ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">filination</a> gets me your blog and the text "Discussing Asian culture and life from a western perspective." That reads a lot better than the filination digg profile (yours?) that reads:

"filination filination submitted 158 days ago (www.filination.com). Struggling to make your way through China’s websites and Chinese online content? …"

A page specific meta description can also help with duplicate content issues.

Anyway, as you mention, Baidu loves their meta data, so it can serve 2 purposes here.

Speaking of which, for some reason Baidu doesn’t seem to like to display the meta description of a website in the SERP’s, at least as far as my checks go.

Once again, great article and I’m also looking forward to what Lonnie will come up with.
fiLi | March 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pm #

Thanks for the comments, Gemme.

There aren’t many people into this subject. How about you write a little more about your experiences, and join forces with me and Lonnie? The more info we can get on this, the better…
Onemanbandwidth: An American Professor in China » Blog Archive » The best short-bus blogs | March 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am #

[...] 3.FiLi’s World: This guy is fluent in at least three languages: Chinese, Geek and English. He has forgotten more about technology and the China Websphere than I will ever know. I will be using his most recent post on Baidu SEO Basics as a point of reference next Saturday as I dumb down (for me, not you) his well researched China Search Engine Marketing Basics. [...]
Mark | March 28th, 2007 at 11:44 am #

I’ve been a keeping pretty close eye on Baidu ever since its IPO, and I’m actually not surprised at how well it’s doing. It’s been gaining market share against Google every year and they’ve recently launched a Japanese version, too. Baidu is not a company that I’d bet against.
Last weeks in China - Chinese SEO, Baidu in Japan, Yahoo Search and Blocked Blogs | April 1st, 2007 at 5:27 pm #

[...] There are still a lot of areas where the SERP’s are not loitered with paid results. This is the part where optimizing your website for Baidu comes into play. Fili, over at Filination.com has done a great job of listing the basics for Baidu. [...]
Last weeks in China - Chinese SEO, Baidu in Japan, Yahoo Search and Blocked Blogs » TechAddress | April 2nd, 2007 at 4:37 pm #

[...] There are still a lot of areas where the SERP’s are not loitered with paid results. This is the part where optimizing your website for Baidu comes into play. Fili, over at Filination.com has done a great job of listing the basics for Baidu. [...]
Onemanbandwidth: An American Professor in China » Blog Archive » SEO CHINA 101.3 | April 6th, 2007 at 2:42 am #

[...] Fili’s World did a great primer on Chinese Search Engine Basics and I with his permission I opted to use it as a springboard for this week’s post: [...]
Last weeks in China - Chinese interview with Matt Cutts and Google Japan Blocked | April 17th, 2007 at 11:24 am #

[...] the last installment I referred to Fili’s article on Chinese SEO. Zac from Chinamyhosting.com did an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts and his Chinese web [...]
Chinese Interview with Matt Cutts and Google Japan Blocked | April 17th, 2007 at 4:54 pm #

[...] the last installment I referred to Fili’s article on Chinese SEO. Zac from Chinamyhosting.com did an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts and his Chinese web [...]
Website4wealth.com | May 25th, 2007 at 3:46 am #

This is great information. Do you mind if I repost this to share it with my community? Of course I will reference you and link back to your site.

Thanks in advance!
fiLi | May 25th, 2007 at 8:54 am #

Glad it’s helpful.

It’s okay as long as there’s a clear visible link back to this blog with appropriate credits.
Patrick | June 25th, 2007 at 6:50 pm #

I don’t see any reason for NOT hosting in China if you target Chinese users. As accessing China-hosted websites from overseas is slow, so is accessing websites hosted overseas when you are in China. The ICP license is no big deal and I have obtained licenses for over 10 websites even before being legally registered in China. The hosting company usually takes care of that. And HK is NOT within the “Great Firewall”, and hosting in HK can be very expensive.

When you host overseas your site may run the risk to be completely cut out from China access (if your host is banned due to hosting other subversive sites, or in events such as last year earthquake).

The only advantage I see for hosting overseas for websites targeting Chinese users is the lower fees, plus less spam for your email accounts since China-based email hosting is just junk.

Patrick
http://www.seo4china.com
fiLi | June 25th, 2007 at 8:08 pm #

Patrick,

Can you recommend a good webhosting in China from personal experience?
Gemme | June 25th, 2007 at 9:34 pm #

Hey Fili, What happened to my comment from the 27th of March. The text disappeared:)
fiLi | June 25th, 2007 at 9:58 pm #

OMG! you’re right.
Damn…
Patrick (seo4china.com) | June 25th, 2007 at 10:45 pm #

I have used a couple of hosting companies in China over the last 3~4 years and the two I can recommend are http://www.web2.cn (formerly owned by lycos) in Shanghai and http://www.t168.net in Shenzhen. Prices are OK and service is good, although in Chinese only…
Hope it helps
Pat
HK-based SEO Specialist
Baidu: i primi risultati sul posizionamento | July 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 am #

[...] In ogni caso per chi fosse interessato ecco un link da cui ho appreso qualcosina..giusto lo stretto indispensabile: Chinese Baidu: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in China. [...]
Frank | July 15th, 2007 at 2:42 am #

Hi,
lot of companies in Swiss do have chinese language websites, but hosted somewhere in Europe. This does have speed disadvantages for users in China.

Question: Using a proxy server in China with an own TLD (.com.cn) for caching those multilingual websites, is it possible?

Just an idea, what do you think?
Onemanbandwidth:An American Professor China Business Consultant SEO China Blog | July 19th, 2007 at 4:53 pm #

[...] word ass-hat (is it hyphenated?), but I kinda like the sound of it. Anyway, it turned out he called Fili and I “Greedy Superficial Bloggers” for discussing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) [...]
» Blog Archive » Sphinn | July 23rd, 2007 at 5:16 am #

[...] *fiLi has an informative blog post on Baidu specifics labeled “Chinese Baidu: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in China.” [...]
SEO for China « The Jack Bauer of Search Engine Optimization | September 20th, 2007 at 12:16 am #

[...] by moth1 on September 19th, 2007 Found a great little write up about Baidu and Google-China. The SEO rules for the Chinese Internet market (Baidu and Google China) are a bit different than [...]
newviewit.com | October 17th, 2007 at 5:07 pm #

Like other things in China, guanxi(relationships) or greasing the palms of those in charge will get you everything you need. I’ve been in IT/web/marketing in China for a few years now and the best way is to scrape under the radar.

Inside China: You don’t want to be hosted by a company owned by the government because that makes it too easy for them to find you, bribe you, and potentially block you. Hosting privately in China equals being on a spam farm, and getting blocked because of being on these servers because of what others are doing (plus it wreaks havoc on your emails, etc).

HK is ok, high cost, but it’s outside the firewall so it’s pretty much the same as being hosted anywhere. Hosting in the US or HK; it doesn’t matter because you will not loose that much speed…capable, dedicated, 24/7, managed western hosting companies are the way to go. Dedicated servers will help ALOT.

I’m in the middle of updating my website and should be fully updated mid Nov with other China SEO issues: http://www.newviewit.com
fiLi | October 19th, 2007 at 11:56 am #

newviewit - Not many folks are writing about Chinese SEO, so I’ll be glad to see your site go up with information about the subject. Good luck with that, and thanks for your input.
raymond | December 26th, 2007 at 4:25 pm #

I hate baidu.Because they always intervene the search result manually.
Vince Gowan | January 1st, 2008 at 12:51 pm #

Hi friends, I am a Chinese from USA, I want to learn what is the difference between SEO & 发布引擎. How would you compare SEO in China to SEO in USA. Thanks,
Vincegowan@gmail.com
kk | January 10th, 2008 at 1:41 pm #

good post
Peter | January 13th, 2008 at 7:46 pm #

Hi there,

great article. Do you happen to have any information about PINYIN. Does it help to have the URL translated in pinyin, rather than showing it in english.

I have an example here: http://www.sentiero.ch/cn65_rui-shi-gao-shan-xiao-wu.htm. The URL means: Swiss alpin huts for rent/sale.

Thank you for your replay in advance.
Peter
fiLi | January 16th, 2008 at 3:56 pm #

Peter - Pinyin wouldn’t help, I’m afraid, unless people were looking for that pinyin, which I don’t think happens very often. But, putting Chinese characters, which are converted into those undecipherable long URLs will show up correctly on search engines as Chinese and will help with SEO. It’s not user friendly, but it’s very SE friendly.
Peter | January 29th, 2008 at 6:20 pm #

Hi there,

I set up my first chinese website ( http://www.sentiero.ch/index_zhongguo.htm ) and it looks all fine (real chinese with these characters…). However, not all of my friends who look at it can see the chinese characters but they see lot of □□□□.

I was using simplified chinese characters (mandorin) and I set the code to ” “.

At the same time, when those guys who only see □□□□ on my site, they can the site ” http://www.myswitzerland.com.cn/ ” without problems (this site is using ” charset=gb2312″).

No matter what charset I was using, the problem remained the same. Do I focus on the wrong issue ?
How can I set up my site “idiot-proved”, meaning that whoever AND on whatever operating system (windows, mac), or browser (internet explorer, firefox…) can see it without problems ?

Would really appreciate your help !
Regards, Peter
Sagem Phones | March 3rd, 2008 at 12:30 am #

Would be great if someone could update this with new SEO for Baidu tricks.
Amy | March 16th, 2008 at 10:55 pm #

I am looking for this for a long time. Thanks very much.
nathan.wu | April 15th, 2008 at 1:34 am #

beijing idc is good
shanghai is soso service is not so good.
nathan.wu | April 15th, 2008 at 11:37 am #

no china GFW will block oversea idc ip
Patricia | April 18th, 2008 at 11:09 pm #

In case you haven’t received an answer to your question as to why your friends see □□□ instead of Chinese characters, I may have a suggestion. I would guess that your friends have not down loaded the Chinese characters package if they are using a PC. This happened to us years ago with our first Chinese site. Some people were seeing some Chinese characters, but not all the time. We couldn’t figure it out at first until we asked our friends to check the Control Panel then Language option and check the boxes to download the Asian characters. I hope that helped, but I see you posted in January so I’m guessing you figured this out by now.
Anne | May 4th, 2008 at 5:54 pm #

FYI: this page http://b2bseoexperts.com/2007/06/01/baidu-chinas-search/ publishes the same article. Violence of copyright or are you and Gabriel Montagne et al the same person(s)?
fiLi | May 4th, 2008 at 6:19 pm #

Anne - violation of copyright. Thanks, I reported them as SPAM to the search engines.
Chris | July 14th, 2008 at 4:31 am #

Extremely informative, and also interesting to note that there are quite a few similarities between Baidu and Yahoo with the importance they give to internal link text, and alt attributes etc.
sandy | July 31st, 2008 at 12:09 am #

I would like to know if it’s possible to advertise a product, like one does on Google, to sell. I have a report on trading, that I would like to put an ad on Baiku. In the US we go to Google and open an account and then place an ad on payper click. Can this be done on Baiku?
sandy | July 31st, 2008 at 12:14 am #

You seem to have a very informative blog. I like it. I just heard about Baiku today. So, I guess I’m way behind the times here. I would like to display ads on Baiku’s version of Google adwords if they have one. Would you know if this is feasible and what the URL is?
Thanks again for your terrific informative blog.
emilio melendez | August 1st, 2008 at 6:44 pm #

We are a small company http://www.UnlimitedWebDesigns.com with 8 Employees, 2 Graphic Designers, 2 Programmer Analysts, 1 SEO / 1 Copywriter, 1 Director of Programming and I, Emilio Melendez the owner of the company.

I am receiving more websites that my team can handle of and we are looking to outsource some of the work we receive.

Please email me if you have any availability to help us while we are growing, we do not intend to grow our side of the business, but we are looking for a company that we can outsource our websites to and that your company will have the availability to grow as we may need more resources from your company.

I will only agree to pay hourly rates and all work will be verified by me team on a daily basis, if you think this might interest you please email me, please put in Subject: China Outsourcing
Thomas Ka | August 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm #

thanks for those information I use with pleasure….

Leave a Feedback