Baidu SEO : duplicate between traditional and simplified chinese?

[Jori]

Hello,

I want to enter the chinese market. But I'm struggling with traditional and simplified chinese.

Should I make two separates websites? One in simplified chinese, without anything from Google to ensure the maximum visibility in mainland China, and another one in traditional chinese, for Taiwanese, Hong Kong and others markets?

Will Baidu take in consideration differently both languages or will it step me down because of duplicate?

Thank you

[lammert]

In principle, Baidu prefers the content language HTML attribute to detect the language, while Google prefers hreflang tags. If you want both search engines to process the content correctly, use both tags.

My experience with one of my sites with pages in both traditional and simplified Chinese is that Baidu displays their SERPs in simplified Chinese, but then sends traffic to the URL which has the "x-default" hreflang. My page marked as "x-default" does an automatic redirect to the page matching the browser language settings of the visitor. I haven't found out yet what exactly prioritizes URLs in Baidu and why they send traffic to the main URL instead of to a language specific version, but my experience is that they are more sloppy in handling duplicate content than Google.

Be sure that your content contains no politically sensitive content. For example if you have language buttons with flags to switch between languages, don't use a flag which represents Taiwan.

[Jori]

I used separated TLDs, a .cn for China and a .com for the rest of the world. Thx!