How to rank in Baidu

[bashi]

Here are eight simple tips to get you started on how to rank in Baidu

* Baidu doesn’t seem to have the same PageRank inbound linking algorithm as Google does, so spending your time by building inbound links with relevant websites in the Chinese internet would largely seem to be a waste of your time, for SEO at least (never hurts to spread the word a bit).

* You’d be better off investing that time and money into your pay-per-click ad campaigns, as higher rankings are achieved solely by higher spend – the relevancy of the content to the search phrase isn’t counted in the way it is with Google.

* Baidu actively censors its content in line with Chinese government regulations, so be very careful with what you put on your site – it would be well worth your time to look into China’s censorship regime to figure out what you can and can’t say before launching.

* With Google, you can host your site anywhere and then set each subdomain’s location using the Geotargeting tool to specify which region it’s relevant to. Baidu doesn’t appear to offer the same service, so your best bet is to buy a Chinese top level domain and host it on a server in China. Luckily domains and hosting services are relatively inexpensive in-country.

* Baidu still loves metadata. While Google has largely discounted the relevance of metatags, etc, Baidu still factors these into consideration...and remember that your metadata should be in Simplified Chinese, not English.

* Keyword research. There are a few different ways to check what keywords are ranking on Baidu, for instance trends on the Baidu Index or the live keyword ranking feed, while Firefox has an extension that displays Baidu stats (a native Chinese speaker may come in handy for all these tasks).

* Get ranked for your news posts and get more visitors by submitting your content updates to the Baidu News Protocol.

* Submit your site to Baidu. This might seem obvious, but if you don’t submit it for the spiders, you’ll never rank!

[Lukehluke]

I have gotten a very small amount of visits from them but I might have to look into it.

Just to be clear, are you saying that they can give you a higher rank if you spend on their PPC?

[Isolde]

Never thought about this. Baidu might give me traffic to. Just submitted my 2 URLs thanks

[Nomar]

Very good thread Bashi! Baidu is a blurry place for me. Webmaster Cage is getting some visitors out of it, but not much

[micheellereviews8]

I recently get interacted with Baidu and I think it's getting cool,....

[pinkvinny]

I never heard about the search engine Baidu I still want my site to have generated traffic on Google since it is more popular and widely used search engine.

[21red]

Don't focus on Baidu, focus on Google & Bing

[bashi]

Yep, BING is upcoming a lot and gaining marketshare in US