What is Baidu?

Baidu is the most widely used search engine in China. While Google is the number one search engine in the USA and Europe, the Baidu search engine dominates the search engine market in China. Companies that operate a website for the Chinese market should work according to the rules for Chinese websites.

Baidu Onpage-Faktoren

• Language on the website: It is immensely important for Baidu that the content of a website is in simple Chinese. Other languages cannot be read. The partial use of English is tolerated on company websites.
• Domain name and URL: The domain name and URLs should be kept descriptive and as short as possible.
• Meta title and meta description: In the search results, the meta title and description are the first thing users see of a website. The better the title and description are chosen, the better the click-through rate. The meta title should contain 35 Chinese characters and the meta description 78 characters. It is also important to note that both can only be read in Chinese.
• Meta keywords: Unlike Google, meta keywords are an important ranking factor for the Baidu search engine. Three to five topic-relevant keywords should be included in the meta keywords. However, keyword stuffing should be avoided.
• Text length: In order to write a search engine relevant text, it should contain a minimum of 300 Chinese characters. If the text is shorter than these 300 characters, the Baidu search engine may not recognise the topic of the page.
• Duplicate content: The search engine giant Baidu is taking strong action against duplicate content and penalising sites that copy content.
• Heading structure: Every page within a website should have an H1 heading that contains the keyword and describes the content of the page.
• Image optimisation: Similar to Google search engine optimisation, the assignment of alt attributes is very important, as search engines cannot read the image content. Alt attributes are relevant for image searches.

Baidu offpage factors

• Backlinks: Links from external websites are an important ranking factor for Baidu. Quantity is the key factor here, while the quality of the backlinks is important for Google search engine optimisation. The Baidu search engine also changes its algorithms and ranking factors from time to time. It is possible that backlink quality will also become relevant in the future. Only backlinks that originate from a .cn domain are included in Baidu’s evaluation.
• Social media: Chinese websites that are also active on the social network Weibo have ranking advantages over those that are not.

Technical factors

• Great Firewall: Baidu favours websites that are also hosted in China. Although sites hosted within the Great Firewall are not officially favoured in the rankings, they do not have to go through state censorship. This results in serious speed advantages for websites hosted in China.
• iFrames, Javascript, Flash: Since the Baidu crawler has problems crawling and reading iFrames, JavaScript, Flash correctly, their use should be avoided.
• ICP licence: ICP stands for Internet Content Publishing. If website operators really want to be successful with their website in China, it is necessary to acquire the Internet Content Publishing Licence. Without this licence, the ranking of a website will never exceed a certain level.
• Pagespeed: Webmasters should pay attention to a good page load time, as this is a decisive ranking factor for Baidu.
• Google services: Many Google services are censored in China. These include Google Analytics, AdSense and YouTube. However, there is a Baidu counterpart for many tools and services.

Our services in international SEO

• Website analysis with a view to the Baidu specifications
• Baidu search engine optimisation
• Definition of individual recommendations for action

Our SEO experts at our online marketing agency will be happy to advise you on international SEO and search engines.