Baidu SEO and Internet in China
What is Baidu?
Baidu(百度) is the worlds largest Chinese internet search engine. The name “百度” was inspired by a ancient poem “…hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos” (众里寻他千百度) which represents persistent search for the ideal. A study in May of 2013 by CNNIC showed the Baidu holds 66.97% of the Internet market share in China. Up until July of 2013 Baidu was ranked 5th over all in the Alexa Internet rankings, and 1st in China.
Internet Search Engine Market Share in China (Jul 2013)
What is situation of internet in China?
China has the world’s largest internet community. By December 2012 the number of internet users in China reached 564 million, making up 42.1% of the population. The number of mobile phone internet users reached 420 million, with an annual growth rate of 18.1%.
Chinese Internet Population History (1997-2013)
What does Baidu and China’s internet community mean to me?
If you plan to take your product or service to China then you can’t overlook the importance of Chinese internet users. There were 242 million Chinese internet users often shop online, with business transactions of 1.25 Trillion RMB in year 2012. Also, 80% of all internet users use search engines to find information online. As China’s most influential search engine, Baidu is no doubt the ideal online marketing channel for foreign companies.
How should I do online marketing in China?
There are a lot of case studies of foreign companies implementing online marketing in China. Most of them succeed by using the following methods:
- Localization of the company website.
- Social media marketing and search engine marketing.
- Marketing on mobile platform such as smartphones and tablets.
How do I localize the company’s website?
Clearly, first you must change your English website into a simplified Chinese website. Using Google translate is one option, but is not a good one. Your team should have an employee that is a native Chinese speaker and has a deep understanding of Chinese culture to perform the translation. Also, do you best to host your website in China and use a Chinese or PinYin domain name. This way your website will run much smoother and faster, making it more appealing to the Chinese viewer.
How can I do social media marketing in China without Facebook, Twitter and Youtube?
China has its own mainstream online social media platforms, Sina Weibo, RenRen, and Youku. Each of these platforms have hundreds of millions users. According to a Fortune Magazine report, 30% of the world’s fortune 500 companies have a Sina Weibo account. Also a L2 Think Tank survey shows, almost 60% of world’s luxury brands have marketing activities on Youku. Due to the significant increase of mobile internet users, marketing with mobile apps for those platforms could be a major focal point in the future.
China’s Social Media Equivalents
How should I do search engine optimization and online advertising for Chinese internet users?
In essence,search engine optimization for Chinese users is basically optimizing your websites for Baidu.
As Google’s competitor in China, Baidu is also trying to provide the best way for people to find what they’re looking for online. However, due to user habits and technology differences, there exist many differences between Baidu and Google. Similarly, Baidu SEO and Google SEO are the same thing in theory because they both require great content and user experience on websites, but we need to use quite different methods to do the work.
How different is Baidu SEO exactly?
To answer this question, I’ll make a comparison between Google SEO for American market and Baidu SEO for Chinese market. Hopefully, it can give you a basic understanding about Baidu SEO and Marketing in China. But first we need to know a few differences between Baidu and Google.
Language barrier and cultural differences.
Language barrier can be easily overcome by high quality translation work, but the cultural differences will always be there. Sometimes the exact same word in different cultures can have different meanings.
For example, “dragon” in Chinese is “龙”, but Chinese people have totally different understanding of dragon from people in America.
Although Google has been very diligent on the search engine localization work, many Chinese still find that Baidu search results meet their expectations better. For Google who is specialized on providing accurate user search results, this is unimaginable. The cause of this condition is Google’s understanding of the Chinese language is based on too much rigorous science but not on real life experiences. On the other hand, Baidu is like a fashion expert, sometime it seems illogical, but it better meets Chinese internet user’s needs.
It is necessary to explain a little more here. Because the Internet environment that American users and Chinese users grow up in are not the same, which creates different understandings of the internet. For most Americans, the internet is an advanced channel for information and service for actual life. People use the internet to send and receive email, search information, learn, and even work. To most Chinese users however, the internet is for causal entertainment. People mainly use the internet to chat, play games, watch movies, and listen to music. Baidu deeply understand this point. Besides providing online search service, Baidu is progressively launching music search, movie search, mobile search, and other products Baidu panders to the majority of the Chinese user market.
Different product positioning.
Google always acts as a leader, standing at the edge of the frontier focusing on how to innovate, with the goal to change the world. Baidu as a latecomer, is following Google’s footsteps closely, but at the same time, it’s trying really hard to figure out a way to survive in the fast-changing internet environment of China. Google’s products always appear in areas where are full of advanced technology and great ideas, but Baidu’s products always appear in places where have the most Chinese internet users and revenue potential. Below is list of some of Baidu’s popular products.
- Baidu Tieba: A query-based searchable community bound tightly with Baidu’s search service.
- Baidu Zhidao: A Chinese language collaborative web-based collective intelligence by question and answer.
- Baidu Baike: China’s largest internet encyclopedia by users and web traffic. It has 5.3 million articles, which are more than the English Wikipedia have.
- Baidu MP3: Provide algorithm-generated links to songs and other multimedia files provided by Internet content providers.
- Baidu News: Provide links to a selection of news and presents news stories in a searchable format. Baidu also have a license which allow it to provide its own reports.
Different revenue methods
Google firmly believes increasing the speed of information flow will bring them profits. In order to give people a convenient and fast method of obtaining information, Google has already penetrated every aspect of life. People have already become dependent on Google without realizing it. “Google it” became the answer to all the questions people have. Google Now can even foresee what questions you will have and prepare the answers for you in advance. People pay Google because it’s gradually becoming an essential part of people’s lives. As for Baidu, it cares more about the quantity instead of the speed of the information flow. Baidu’s revenue method is simpler – wherever the people are, then where Baidu’s products will be. Baidu always focus on building things the most Chinese internet users interested in, then make profits from them.
The three things above confirmed that we have to use different strategies and methods to work with Google and Baidu.
In the table below I listed some of the important differences between those two search engine which usually need our attention in SEO work.
| Baidu | |
|---|---|
| For website content preference, the homepage is more weighted, inner pages are less important. Prefers flat site structure. | Don’t have deep linking issues, inner pages can equally achieve good rankings. |
| For website preference, pages on popular websites rank higher (regardless of content originality) | Prefers original content. Small sites can also achieve good rankings. |
| Prefers websites with well organized internal links | Prefers sites with reliable external links (High quality backlinks). |
| Prefers pages which the title includes a single keyword. Likes keyword appearance in the name of directory or static html file. | Prefers keywords in URL. Prefers site map, web master tool can speed up indexing. |
| New sites have to be reviewed first, and are indexed slowly. | New sites are indexed fast, after indexing there is an observation period, progressively filtering indexed pages. |
| Sudden Ranking changes may occur, and quite common. | Website rankings are comparatively stable, and gradually improve. |
| Doesn’t completely follow robots protocol. | Strictly follow robots protocol. |
| Values content updates. | Values unique web content. |
| The difference between PPC advertisement and organic search results on SERP is not clear. | PPC advertisements and organic search results have clear borders. |
| Users will skim over the whole search result page. | Users only focus on a few search results at the top. |
| Baidu owned products or partner’s products are ranked higher. | No evidence shows Google favor it own products in search results |
| Censorship from the government | No Censorship |
Internet in China have a very special history compared to the rest of the world, and it’s future still unpredictable with the rapid growth. To become successful in such a fast-changing environment, one will need lots of experience and a great amount of time.That makes Baidu SEO a more challenging work to do, which makes our job at Atlanta SEO a little more interesting.