Ranking Well In the Baidu Search Engine

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Getting good rankings in the Baidu search engine is not an easy task if you are accustomed to working with Western search engines such as Google US. The Chinese search engine spiders sites much the same as other spiders. It follows links from one site to another and also follows links that are submitted to it manually. However, there are a few differences in the way the websites are ranked. For instance, Baidu places more emphasis on the number of incoming links and meta descriptions, while Google is concerned with quality of incoming links.

Information on Baidu

Baidu is the leading search engine for websites, audio files, and images in China. The company offers a Chinese language search platform, which consists of websites and certain online application software, as well as Baidu Union, which is the company’s network of third-party websites and software applications. The company primarily provides Chinese language Internet search services to enable users to find relevant information online, including web pages, news, images and multimedia files, through links provided on its websites. You can read more about the full services available on the the Baidu search engine on China Analyst.com.

Baidu introduced “phonetic” or “pin-yin” search, which allows users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets. This feature is designed to skip the switching from English input to Chinese input, and for when the user is not sure of the written form of a keyword. Since there are many different ways to pronounce and state common words, and many different dialects, this was a huge addition for the search engine which greatly set it apart from all other search engines. Read more about Pin-Yin.

Baiduspider, the proprietary spider for the Baidu search engine, is load capacity friendly and is designed so it will not overload your site by visiting it too quickly. Unlike some other search spiders of the West, Baiduspider also obeys the Internet robot agreement. You can forbid baiduspider from indexing all or part of your site, by correctly setting up your robots.txt file to block portions or your entire site. Read more about how to optimize your Robots.txt file on our blog.

In addition to natural search results, Baidu also displays paid search results within the body of its search results. Baidu mixed its paid advertisements with its natural search results until recently when the search engine began to separate the results. Soon, all paid results will be segregated from natural listings (very similar to Google) making it easier to find organic rankings quickly, and more important to implement your SEO correctly.

Key Takeaways

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