SEO practices for Baidu and other Chinese search engines are little known in the Western world. However, in order for a company to promote itself successfully in the Middle Kingdom, it is absolutely necessary to go online in China. Chinese SEO is not only about working on the on-site and off-site aspects of a site, there are also many administrative tasks to take into account: the creation of a site in China can pose governmental problems (obtaining a Chinese mobile line, applying for an ICP license, proving that the company is well established in China, etc.)
In order for readers to understand how SEO and web-marketing works in China, tips, advice and case studies are presented throughout this book.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere — even offline. Perfect for commutes or when you’re on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Baidu SEO by Véronique Duong in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Popular Culture. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
The Chinese search engine Baidu had a significant monopoly in China before the arrival of HaoSou (formerly 360) in 2012. Baidu held around 80% of the market share in August 2010 but, four years later, had no more than 56%.
HaoSou won around 20–30% of the market in 2 years, thus becoming the second most used search engine in China.
Sogou, the third search engine used in China, holds around 12% of the market share. Around 5–10% is left for other search engines, including Google.
Faced with such fierce competition, Baidu began to innovate, producing original and increasingly interesting applications. It provides services that other search engines do not have. For example, Internet users can place sponsored links on images (Search Engine Advertising (SEA), which has never been done on any other search engine.
One of Baidu’s strongest innovations is the prediction of trends relating to the Chinese economy, using queries made by users in the search engine.
Baidu may have looked like an imitation of Google in the past, but it very quickly evolved, becoming an innovative search engine. For example, in keyword generation tools, Baidu can clearly determine and separate “Desktop” and “Mobile” search volumes, which Google does not yet do (in 2016). Furthermore, in terms of the trends tool, the Baidu Index (the equivalent of Google Trends) provides more data on semantic fields, demography and current news topics, and more forums, which are linked to the searches made in this tool.
Figure 1.1.Baidu logo written in Chinese characters and pinyin
We are going to explore Baidu’s general services (its subdomains), and its tools that are important for SEO, as well as the main ways of ranking a site in the Chinese search engine.
1.2. Very “rich” Search Engine Results Page
In 2014, while Google reduced Authorship and author photos, Baidu increased the display of visuals in Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). Today, with the new update of the search engine, an image is often displayed alongside the snippet, producing very loaded search result pages. Of 10 results, half have an image alongside the meta-description. These images are extracted automatically from the sites.
Images in SERPs tend to attract users and increase the “click-through rate” in SEO. A high click-through rate has a positive effect on Chinese SEO.
On Baidu, the majority of icons and visuals must be paid for. SEO elements are supposed to be free, and are generated with JavaScript or HTML code, so that they appear in the search results (for example Rich Snippets with Schema.org or Authorship in 2013–2014 on Google).
We will see further on in this book that microdata do not work for the Chinese search engine.
The itemprop and conditions tags of the Google Schema.org site do not work on Baidu. The Chinese search engine does not take them into account.
In reality, it is the new SEA format “Baidu Shantou
” that makes it possible to generate Rich Snippets by paying for the service. We only need to create an SEA campaign with Baidu Shantou to display an image or event in our snippets.
We wondered how images could be generated in the Baidu SERP, and defined the following conditions:
1) use photos of around 121 × 75 pixels;
2) name image files with keywords, product names, brands, etc.;
3) fill the alt attributes of images with popular keywords;
4) place keywords in the textual content around the image, relating to the alt attribute of the image.
This service was created in China in 2014, and many major brands are beginning to get involved. There is documentation of this in Chinese. However, for logos, there is a different method for generating the image in the Baidu search results. This is done in Webmaster Tools. This subject will be discussed in Chapter 5.
1.3. Baidu versus HaoSou and Sogou
As previously mentioned, the most used Chinese search engines in China are Baidu, HaoSou (formerly 360) and Sogou.
Since Google left China in 2010 for reasons relating to censorship and China’s non-transparency in information processing, the American search engine has hardly been used at all. We are going to compare the market shares in 2010 and 2014 to show what happened in 4 years.
In August 2010, Baidu clearly had the monopoly, with almost 80% of the market share. Nonetheless, Google China had 12% of the market share, outperforming Sogou (HaoSou did not yet exist).
However, between 2010 and 2014, there were many changes in search engines in China: Google China left the Middle Kingdom due to censorship problems in 20101, and the search engine 360 (the future HaoSou) arrived on the market in 2012.
The dispute between 360 and Baidu was tense to the extent that searching “360” in Baidu produced a warning message from the number one Chinese search engine in 2014.
This warning, generated by Baidu, referred to the violation of the 20th law of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China. The message revealed that 360 was preventing Internet users from downloading Baidu’s antivirus, while promoting its own.
In order to ensure the “freedom” and autonomy of Internet users in their choice of security software installation, Baidu asked those who wanted to install their antivirus to uninstall 360’s first.
In 2014, a Chinese web marketing expert told us that Baidu and 360 regularly met in court over unfair competition. This battle divided Internet users more and more, and 360 began to eat away at Baidu’s market shares.
Sogou has also progressed and provides unique services that neither Baidu nor HaoSou (formerly 360) have integrated into their search engines, such as WeChat messages (the number one social ...
Table of contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
1 Baidu, Its Services and Its Competitors
2 Technical Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO
3 Semantic and Editorial Advice and Tips for Baidu SEO
