While many of us are familiar with Google’s ranking factors and have a good understanding of the key on-page SEO measures to get your site ranking, there’s little out there in terms of resources with regards to what makes Baidu optimization.
Thankfully, the mind-set remains largely the same, and in practice Baidu’s ranking algorithm isn’t too dissimilar to Google’s. However, there are of course some key differences to consider:
Site Architecture and Functionality
Keep it simple. At this stage, Baiduspider isn’t as developed as Google’s in terms of crawl power, and favours flat-structured sites in which content is accessible in as few clicks as possible (here’s a useful FAQ on Baiduspider in English).
Baidu also doesn’t deal with Flash or JavaScript, so be sure to provide HTML alternative versions of the content.
Don’t use Frame and iFrame
Keep URL structure short and if possible, use Pinyin (Romanised version of Chinese characters).
Page Titles & Meta Data
Much like with Google, make sure title tags and meta data are unique, descriptive and is in keyword optimised Simplified Chinese.
Title tag character limit is 80.
Google may have renounced them from their ranking factor a while back, but meta descriptions and meta keywords do factor into ranking for Baidu.
Meta description character limit is 200, meta keywords is 100.
Alt tags and heading tags also have increased prominence in Baidu’s ranking algorithm – be sure to optimise in Chinese accordingly.
Links
Link building is a key factor in Baidu ranking. While the general assumption is that it favours quantity over quality, this is becoming less prevalent with the introduction of recent spam-combating algorithm updates. We’ll look at those later (as well as a quick look at how to link build for Baidu), though here are some key considerations:
Target links from high-authority, industry-relevant Chinese-based sites.
Internal and external link anchor text remains of high importance.
In terms of internal linking, be sure that each URL you want to rank has at least one on-site link pointing at it.
Baidu does actually count non-hyperlinked URLs as links, allowing these to contribute to ranking.
On-Page Content
As you would guess, it’s vital to ensure that your site content is written in unique, optimised Simplified Chinese.
Never rely on Google Translate for the creation of unique copy and ensure that what you’re writing is correctly localised and is well-informed by keyword trends from Baidu’s keyword research tool.
In a similar vein to Google, Baidu also favours sites that frequently refresh their content, so ensure you’ve got an outlet such as a blog or news section to provide freshly optimised content every now and then.
Tags (hreflang, canonical etc)
Up until recently, Baidu didn’t support the canonical tag, however now it does.
Baidu also now supports the nofollow and noarchive tags
Much like Bing, Baidu doesn’t yet adhere to hreflang and so should instead incorporate the HTML lang attribute to define the language of the page e.g. html lang=”zh-cn”
Domain Hosting
For Baidu, it is best practice to procure a site that is hosted in China on a CN domain. However, this isn’t fully vital in achieving success in Baidu, and for businesses operating outside of China this can be tricky and a little frustrating as accessing Chinese-hosted sites from outside of China is a much slower affair. If possible, get your hands on a Hong Kong-hosted site; though a correctly Baidu-optmised CN sub-domain certainly won’t leave you out of the Baidu ranking race.