How to get site listed in Baidu?

What are the rules to get into Baidu?

[financialhost]

I can't seem to get my site into the Baidu search engine. The site is in English but i have seen other sites listed in English on Baidu.com.

DO i have to submit it somewhere? It is in chinese & i am having problems working this out.

My site is listed in every other major search engine & has lots in links from big sites - but it appears that Baidu does not list a site in this merit.

Any help appreciated.

[redstorm]

When did you publish your website online? It usually takes some time to get included in Baidu even for the Chinese website.

[financialhost]

It has been online for years...

I notice that a lot of English speaking sites are not listed in Baidu.

Do you have to submit the URL instead of the normal way of linking in or is it a matter of following special rules,

Hosting in China,
Links from Chinese websites,
Language Characters set to chinese...

Or some other reason.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks

[bill]

I notice that a lot of English speaking sites are not listed in Baidu.

Yes, that's true. It's primarily a Chinese language search engine. Does your site contain Chinese language content? Are you targeting the market in China somehow?

In general I've found that trying to get English language websites into Japanese and Chinese language search engines is a waste of time in the majority of cases. If you want to target those markets and get listed in local language SEs then it is important to have content in the local language.

If you're targeting the local populace that speaks English then you're looking at a relatively small piece of the pie. Those are quite small markets. In those cases you would want to look into local hosting, local TLDs, local e-commerce options, etc.

[redstorm]

Just as what our moderator Bill said, Baidu is a Chinese search engine, so it will automatically give top priority to the Chinese language website to get included. Provided it’s a “must” for you to get included in baidu, then you should make Chinese web pages to attract baidu spider.

[financialhost]

The site is in English but does target the Chinese market - the domain extension is a .hk.

Regardless of what you have said - i have seen sites using 100% English appear in Baidu. How did they manage that?

Also in my particular market the majority of the Chinese community use English - so i require the site to be listed in Baidu so that when English search terms are used, the site has a chance to appear.

Does anyone else know a way into Baidu?

[bill]

Nobody said that there weren't English sites in Baidu's SERPs. What we were saying was that you may not be focusing your efforts on the best area. Trying to SEO an English site for a Chinese language SE isn't always the best use of one's time and effort. As you didn't really provide all that much information in your initial post we were left to speculate why you would want to do such a thing.

Even for English keywords Baidu ranks pages higher from sites that have Chinese language content in them. They tend to prefer sites hosted in China and those with the .cn TLD.

As your site doesn't seem to meet any of these criteria you might want to look into PPC.