Mike Ren, an SEO specialist from Beijing, explains how to rank on Baidu, China's search engine with 80% market share. Baidu's first page is dominated by its own subdomains, indexes pages slowly, and rewards homepage authority. Quick ranking tactics using bot clicks still work on Baidu, unlike Google, where they're easily caught.
Chapters
Welcome to a special, very special edition of Proling Mondays from China. I have had the chance to be here since a few days, and I have had the chance also to meet one of the top specialists here on Baidu SEO. So I had the opportunity to ask him about the top criteria, top insights, top trends of search. In China, including of course Baidu. And I hope that you enjoyed this as much as I did. Let's take a look.
Hello everyone, it's great to be here. Opportunity to talk about Baidu ICO. First of all, let me introduce myself. My name is Mike Ren, ZAC, and I'm based in Singapore, but originally I came from Beijing. Then I migrated to Singapore about 10 years ago. So currently I'm doing personal consulting work for mainly Chinese clients. Currently there are actually a few search engines in China. Baidu is the major one. There are a few smaller ones like Soso, in Chinese it means search and search. Also Sogou, search dog, something like that. But the market share of Baidu is about 80%, so the majority of the users are still using Baidu. Baidu is still a very popular search engine, but the trust in Baidu is getting worse because of a few accidents. Someone searching for medical issue in Baidu and then they get a fake website and they call the fake doctor and they got scammed. So that's— it happened a few times. So the people in city know this case well, but in countryside a lot of people don't know. really know these things. So people are still using Baidu, but in cities, young men, young women, younger generation are losing trust in Baidu. So they are also going to the website similar to Quora, but there's a Chinese version called zhuhu.com.
Zhuhu.com.
It's the same question-based website. A lot of people are typing there and they provide a lot of very high-quality content. So they search there. Also, they search in WeChat. WeChat is a Chinese Chinese version of WhatsApp, so it's very popular. And I think everyone in China is using WeChat. And in Baidu's search, actually the layout of the search page is quite similar to Google. You can see some ads, I think up to 5 ads at the top. Also at the bottom you can see 2 to 5 advertising at the bottom. In the middle, actually in Baidu you can also see news News content, pictures, photos, and videos. The news. So the layout, the content is the same. But the real problem is that Baidu has a lot of their own content subdomain. So they have Wiki. So a lot of people ask questions, answer questions in Baidu domain. So they rank their own content. In the first page. Very commonly you can see 5 or 6 pages belong to Baidu itself. So that's the first problem they are facing. The second problem is that if you want to enter into Chinese SEO market, currently it's very tough because the popular way of ranking in Baidu is called quick ranking. Basically, it's better to use machine or sometimes use human beings to click the result on the page. So to increase the click-through rate in Google, I know at NSN click-through rate also ranking factor, but it's a small ranking factor. So Google will keep up with NSN. So they can detect, okay, this is a black hat, this is spammy. 所以 我们 在 这 台， 嗯， 在 这 台， 它 是 工作 的。 它 是 工作 的 很好， 可能 在 过 去 一 年。 然后 我也 不知道 是不是 大家 不 在 乎， 或者 没有 办 法 解 决 这个 问题。 但是 现在 它 是 工作 的 很好， 所以 这是 一个 问题。 Technically, the basic theory and the concept of Baidu SEO is almost the same as Google SEO, but there are a few technical differences. For example, Baidu has a very strong domain homepage optimization authority. So in Google, it doesn't really matter which page you put your keywords. So whether it's our homepage or category page or maybe product page or article page, that doesn't really matter. But in Baidu, it really makes a difference. So the trend in Baidu SEO is that we put a lot of keywords on homepage. Also a few other technical differences. For example, the indexing speed in Baidu is quite low. So in Google, in a few minutes You can see the result in search page, but in Baidu, maybe you have to wait a few days. So the indexing crawling speed is rather slow. Also, for example, another issue is duplicated content. In Google, you can copy or duplicate content from other website. You can scrape content from other website and publish on your website, but Google is very good To identify who is the original source. For Baidu, whether they cannot identify who is the original source or they don't care. So for a small new webmaster with a new website, you publish an article and someone else with a similar website, a lot of local portals, If they copy or scrape your website or publish on their own website, then they will get the penalty.
What about meta robots noindex, canonical tags? Do they work in the same way in Baidu?
It should be working in the same way. Say for example, 301 redirect or canonical or nofollow or canonical builder, everything they support. But for example, If you put a 301 redirect, it will take ages to take effect. In Google less than one month, it will okay new new website. If you have an old website, you can 301 redirect for your new website. The migration will happen within one month. But in Baidu, personally, I encounter a case that 301 redirect. Didn't take effect after one year. They supposed to be supporting all everything, but it's very slow. Whether it's .com or .cn, it's okay. But if your target market is purely in China, mainland China, of course for branding purpose, .cn domain is better. Actually, the bigger problem is hosting part. If your target market is China, of course, naturally you want to put your server in China, but because of policy issue, you have to— if you want to host your website in China, you have to kind of register a license with local government. So the process is very difficult for a foreign person. Of course, if you have a local company registered in China, then you can do that. Okay. Maybe it's possible, but I tried that. It takes a long time, a lot of work. You have to take a photo of yourself in front of certain background. Foreign company, if you are serious to enter China market, you have to go through them. If you host your website in another country, it's okay. Baidu still can crawl your website, index your website, and the speed of crawling Indexing is okay. It won't slow the indexing speed. But the problem is sometimes the so-called Great Firewall may block your IP address. So if they block your IP address, the whole server is not accessible from inside. And it happens almost randomly. You cannot see when your website will be blocked. So it's very difficult. Also, your website It doesn't have to be anything political related, no. Maybe because another website on the same server, if you use shared hosting, maybe something very random happens, the firewall will just block your website. In China, I don't think a lot of webmasters are tracking their ranking in Baidu. Of course, the big companies, they have their own internal tools, they have programmers, they Just build an internal tool to track their ranking. But for a personal website or small company, they don't really track the ranking month by month. So all they need is the link profile. They want to know where their competitors are getting the links so that they can get the link from the same place. So you want to build an SEO tool for China market? That function, the link profile function, is the most important thing. All the rest, it's good to have, but it's not really critical. But in China, a lot of people are doing a lot of things manually. For example, if they want to do keyword research, they don't really need a tool to do that. They just log into Baidu App platform, they also provide the keyword. That's enough for them. In Baidu, there are also a Chinese version of Search Console. Google Search Console is called Baidu资源. You can see links, also your index size, also mobile-related issues. You can check a lot of things in the Baidu. 资源百度百度Webmaster Tools something like that. And also in China, we use some other tools to check the web links because although we know a lot of tools to check links, but it's not very popular in China. For example, website Explorer or PageRank. Although it's well known in China, but I don't think they have a lot of customers. right now, mainly because of price, I think. But in China, actually, there's no other official way to check your competitors' links. So in Baidu Search Console or Baidu Webmaster Tools, you can only check the links of your own website. You cannot check competitors'. So there's no good tools in China. There are a few tools available. For example, aizhan.com means love website in Chinese. It's a popular tool in China, but actually the link data from that website is not real link data. I guess they just use site command or link command to check in Google or Baidu to get the number. So there's no real tools to check your competitors' link profile. So I think there's a potential for tools from other countries to maybe look at the China market. There are a lot of bypassers, but there's no very good resources or tools currently.
