What SEOs need to know about Baidu in 2017

[bill]

http://searchengineland.com/seos-need-know-baidu-2017-281275 [searchengineland.com]

What SEOs need to know about Baidu in 2017

Interested in breaking into the Chinese search market? Columnist Hermes Ma shares some recent Baidu updates, along with SEO advice for those trying to rank in the Chinese search engine.

The first half 2017 was stressful for Baidu, which witnessed a recession in active advertisers and stagnant revenue. Nonetheless, we see the search giant putting a huge amount of resources into AI and into building China’s web ecosystem.

We don't see too many good overviews of the China SEO market or Baidu in English, so I thought I'd share this one.

[TorontoBoy]

The issues I have with Baidu, Sogou, and Yisou is their site registration process. I can read and write Chinese, so language is not an issue, but they want a China-based phone number and email address to verify your site?

It just looks like Chinese search engines do not want to index content, Chinese or otherwise, outside of Mainland China.

[bill]

How have you worked around those local requirements? Do you have any tips for getting around them?

I have always had local servers and people you assist me with those requirements.

[keyplyr]

@TorontoBoy - verify our sites for what? A webmaster tools account?

All 3 of my sites are in those 3 indexes and I've never verified them.

[TorontoBoy]

Sure, Baidu Sogou and Yisou also index my sites, but, as with not registering with Google, I do not believe their crawls are complete. My sites are also not verified, so SERPs may be lower. For example I'd like to submit a site map to them, as they are missing some of my content. If they would index my content properly I'd put more effort into translating to Chinese.

I've not been able to get around their domestic requirements of a local email address and local phone. I have no people in China to use for this. The best I can hope for is that their spider bot is smart enough to find my sites and all my content, on their own, but they obviously need help. I would gladly verify my sites, but they do not allow me a facility to do this.

It is apparent to me that Chinese search engines want content sites to be in complete Chinese, be hosted in China and written by domestic Chinese. So much for internationalization within China.

[amanga]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for sharing this. I have some additional but specific questions regarding SEO for Baïdu. If a SEO expert specialized in SEO for China has a few minutes to answer this, that would be lovely.

We will launch the China version of our website end of spring. We already have the .cn and .com contains regional landing pages.

1) We know that X% of our revenue are coming from people living in China and having an English browser. For this reason, the company wants to provide an alternative English version for the China version.
- In 2018, is it 100% ok to display English on a .cn domain? Ex (mydomain.com/en/xxxxx-yyyyy-zzzz)
- If it's ok, is it better to let Baidu and Google indexing English pages or should we put meta robot with noindex attributes on all English pages on .cn domain in order to avoid confusion with English pages from the .com domain?

2) The company wants to enable Chinese language for people living in US and Canada. For now, we have been doing SEO by country (+ their official language). US & CA are managed under directories on the same .com domain. On my side, I asked them to put all regional (non-China) pages in English in noindex,nofollow to avoid duplicate content effect globally AND with the .cn domain.

However, the company is challenging me on the potential risk because -obviously- there is money to make by opening chinese in US & CA.
- Is it 100% safe to index Chinese language on the .com based on the fact it's going to be a duplicate at 90% of the .cn domain? To do this, I would block "Baidu Spider" bot on the robots.txt
If the answer is no, any kind of official documentation or declaration from Baïdu would help me.

In advance, thank you for your help!

[not2easy]

Hello amanga and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I have no background with this type of implementation but others here are more familiar with the situation. It appears that you might benefit from the use of "hreflang=" tags for the otherwise duplicate content. There's a current discussion on that topic that may be useful: [webmasterworld.com...]

I should add that I have never been able to influence the Baidu crawlers via robots.txt, it seems to do as it pleases.

[bill]

You need to host your China site inside China if you're serious about that country's market. If this is just for Chinese speakers outside China then you have more options. Are you targeting China as well as Chinese speakers outside China?