How to get Indexed in Chinese Search Engines

Encoding Type + Indexing in baidu, Sohu etc

[worldstonex]

Hello!

My website has been around for a year now and is very well indexed in English search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. However, if I go to baidu.com and type my website URL then it does not find it i.e. it has not even indexed it.

I find it surprising that the search engine bot has not found my site in that long a period. But tell me if that is possible! And if that is the case, do you know if there are things similar to Yahoo Directory, where you can get an entry by paying and thus hopefully guarantee that the search bots will find you. Also, are there crawlers similar to Inktomi whom you can pay to come visit your site frequently and index it?

Finally, we are using UTF-8 as our encoding type. Do search engines have a problem with this?

Thanks for the help!

Kunal

[bill]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld worldstonex.

I do all my Chinese sites in GB2312, not UTF-8, and haven't had any problem with Baidu picking up pages. I haven't heard of people having specific problems with unicode sites and Baidu though. Maybe this is an issue. Has anyone else run into this?

If you want a paid directory listing then I've had good luck with Sohu. They have a pretty good collection of of sites that are using them so I felt comfortable paying. However this may differ by industry.

I'm not aware of any big name site feeds like Inktomi. Generally in the Chinese market you're safe with PPC and maybe a directory listing in Sohu or Yahoo.

[HarryM]

I have pages on my UK-hosted site which are indexed by Baidu and other Far East search engines, but they only seem to crawl those pages that are in Chinese encoding. I use Big5 and GB2312, so I don't know how they would react to UTF-8. Presumably your pages are marked as lang="zh"?

However you have to get them to visit in the first place, which means a link from a page they already have indexed, i.e., from a Chinese or Chinese-hosted site. I presume you can also submit your url, but I have never tried this.

[worldstonex]

Bill, thanks for the information. My impression is that Chinese websites prefer GB2312 even though some of them might support UTF-8. So I think that it makes sense for me to change my encoding type. If anyone else has thoughts on this issue, please let me know.

I have heard of Sohu since it is one of the big one Portals/Directory in China. How much was the cost for getting the listing? Also, since Sohu is completely in Chinese, do I have to get my translator involved to have my site added? How di you do it?

Also, if I have a listing in Yahoo.com Directory, do I automatically get a listing in Yahoo chinese Portal?

[worldstonex]

I don't have my pages marked as lang-"zh" and I am using UTF-8. So this is probably causing a problem.

However, if I go to baudi.com and type 'my keyword', then it does return a few Chinese sites that link to my site. So I am not sure why it is not able to visit my site. I have also just submitted my URL on baudi.com today.

How do you get links with Chinese sites if you don't understand Chinese i.e. does my translator have to find out the websites and then contact them? Do you know of any Chinese guys in Austin, Texas that can help me with my link campaign, submission to directories etc. Thanks for your guidance and help in this new area!

[edited by: Woz at 11:18 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics please, see TOS#13 [/edit]

[bill]

I have heard of Sohu since it is one of the big one Portals/Directory in China. How much was the cost for getting the listing?

They have a few different packages now. When I got my site listed they only had a distinction between commercial and non-commercial directory listings. Now they have some more aggressive packages available. Sohu ad info [add.sohu.com]

Also, since Sohu is completely in Chinese, do I have to get my translator involved to have my site added?

You'll need someone who reads and writes Chinese to go through the application process. Absolutely none of it is in English.

if I have a listing in Yahoo.com Directory, do I automatically get a listing in Yahoo chinese Portal?

Yahoo China [cn.yahoo.com] is a completely different listing. You would have to go through the entire listing process there in Chinese.

How do you get links with Chinese sites if you don't understand Chinese

That's not too easy. How are you handling business transactions with all your Chinese customers? What about sales inquiries? If you don't have someone who is good with the language working with you it will be difficult to make much headway. Machine translations will only take you so far. You may need to add some Chinese speaking staff to help further your business in that region.

[edited by: bill at 7:06 am (utc) on Oct. 27, 2004]

[worldstonex]

Thanks for all the info. This really helps. We do have Chinese Translators on our staff and all our content for the Chinese site will be human traslated. However, they have not gone through the process of link building before. But I get your point - there is no way around it! So I will train them.

[asinah]

We run an educational portal in Chinese (utf encoding) and a tourism portal (GB encoding).

Both our UTF and GB content are well indexed in Baidu and Google and I think it doesn't matter which encoding type you would use.

We started our campaign in Chinese around 4 months ago and currently have around 4000 uniques per day which we hope to double every month.

Make sure you have some good incoming links (organic links) and be patient with the results. Baidu takes many months before your results show up with some good and acceptable serps.

Good luck

[redstorm]

hi,worldstonex:
Since i am in Beijing,China, I think i can help you to get your web site listed. Now i think the mainland China internet market has been integrated by web sites of search engines, Portals, Vertical commerence web sites. Provided your site get listed by one of these sites(important ones), It may easily found by other sites, maybe automaticlly indexed by other search engines. Best regards