How Baidu is similar & different from Google — Marcus Pentzek // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “So there are those listings with those, there are the search snippets with the headlines. There's some description, there's the URL, which you can click. This is quite similar and they roughly have 10 organic results just as Google.”

• “So you need content. You need to know where your HTML is. You need to prove that your website has authorities, so you need backlinks. So all these ranking factors are basically all the same all around the world and this is not different for Baidu.”

• “the Chinese market is somehow regulated by this great Chinese firewall... it monitors all the traffic that's coming from outside of China and going into China.”

• “You want to have your content in Chinese. And this is not only Chinese. You want it in Mandarin Chinese and simplified Chinese characters, which is basically the script that is being written in China...”

• “I utilized 50,000 Chinese keywords and checked their rankings on Baidu and analyzed those to see what are basically the ranking factors... it's dot com domains ranking for 75% of all those results. ”

• “Then you want to have longer content. We have been talking about longer content which means around 3000 Chinese characters in length...”

• “only 30% of the top ranking pages actually do have images implemented while I did see there as a positive correlation.”

• “We only see like 50% share of HTTPs on the rankings, but this is growing because it was just introduced very shortly. I think it's like three, four years ago that they started crawling HTTPS websites.”

• “So the backlinking strategy is incredibly important to drive rankings and visibility in China, but it's a little bit of a different strategy than it would be in Google.”