By: Codex-M
Thinking about doing business in China? Then you’d better start thinking about optimizing for Baidu. This China-based search engine is as dominant in that country as Google is in the US, and its ambitions stretch beyond its country’s borders. You can’t approach SEO in the same way for Baidu that you do for Google, however, as this two-part article series reveals.
Baidu is a Chinese search engine; in fact, it is the leading search engine in China and has been starting to increase its market share globally.
If this trend continues, Baidu in the future may become one of the biggest search engines, along with Google, its rival. This increase in market share also increases the importance of getting good rankings in the Baidu search engine, particularly if you are targeting customers coming from China.
Getting good rankings in Baidu requires understanding the search engine optimization guide that works with the Baidu search engine.
The objective of this article is present the general guidelines for optimizing websites to get a better ranking in Baidu. This includes the onsite and offsite SEO guidelines. This is a two-part article series.
The official guide is available at the baidu.com domain in pure Chinese: http://wenku.baidu.com/view/6991a97931b765ce05081485.html
To understand the document, it has been translated into English. The main key points and suggestions will be discussed here.
Technical and Quality Guidelines for the Baidu Search Engine
Like Google, Baidu uses a search engine crawler. It’s called the “Baidu spider.” Its job is to fetch content from web pages and put it in their index. This is the same process that the Googlebot goes through.
According to the Baidu Search Engine Optimization Guide, there are a number of important categories you need to consider.
Category 1: Crawlability
1. It is recommended that you use text instead of flash, images, JavaScript, etc. to display important content or links. The Baidu spider cannot recognize text that is contained in those formats.
2. If you use Flash-based web technology to present content, you should present a pure text equivalent to be crawled and indexed by the Baidu spider. This can be done by putting a link on the home page to the text version.
3. Do not use iFrame when presenting web content. The content displayed by iFrame will be ignored by the Baidu spider.
Category 2: Site Structure
1. Your site should have a clear structure and clear navigation that makes it easy for users to find content.
2. This also makes it easy for search engines to understand the website’s content quickly, thus increasing the chances for better rankings.
3. Use a tree structure and breadcrumbs. Like a tree, the trunk is the home page, with branches made up of the website categories, and the leaves being the content pages. Breadcrumbs make it possible for users to know where they are in your website, so they can easily navigate back to the home page if they need to.
4. Ideally, the site structure should be flat. For example, going from the home page to a content page should force users to go through as few levels (clicks) as possible. This makes it easy for users to find content by using only a very few clicks to reach the content page.
5. Maintain a good linking structure. For example, there should be a link from the home page going down to the category pages and then to the content pages.
6. Use plain HTML text links for navigation. Maintain link consistency; for example, on every page of the website, there should be a link back to the home page. Do not use complex JavaScript-based links or flash.
7. Place the more important content links prominently on the home page.
8. When using image links, use the alt text. This makes it easy for search engines to know what the target page is all about.
Category 3: Sub-domains and Directory
1. If you are using a category structure on your website, you can use a directory structure to present content if the categories are not large or rich enough to exist as independent websites.
2. If the category seems to be very broad and rich in content, you can use a sub-domain structure.
3. To have the strongest impact on rankings, make sure to maintain a strongly themed website. There should be a strong correlation of content from the main website to its categories/directories for search engines to get a better understanding of the website’s theme.
4. Prevent duplicate content in sub-domains and directories.
5. Do not abuse the sub-domain structure. Creating too many sub-domains without substantial content will be grounds for a search engine penalty.
