Baidu is the market leader in terms of both revenue and traffic of China's search engine competition . While each search engine in China tends to have a different demographic, with Baidu commanding over 66% of the market, it’s tougher to pinpoint a specific demographic for them. The search giant serves users in just about all demographics.
Recently, Baidu’s market share has fallen considerably, diving from 77% to 66.91% in the last year alone. Much of their recent decline can be attributed to growing competition from new search players, such as Qihoo 360, as well as the criticism that they haven’t been doing enough in the mobile market.
China Search Engine Market Share, March 2013
Baidu isn’t taking this lying down though. They recently purchased app store, 91 Wireless for $1.9 billion to bring themselves back into the mobile game. Regardless, with a market share of over 66%, it’s clear Baidu is not to be ignored in China SEO.
Key Differences Between Baidu and Google
Much of the reason behind their commanding lead can be attributed to Baidu being the first big mover in the Chinese search engine market. They initially modeled themselves on Google, as you can see many similarities in their design and layout choices.
That’s not to say the two search engines are identical. Quite a number of differences still remain between Baidu and Google.
For example:
- Keep ‘em Coming Back – SERP clicks open in a new browser window / tab, leaving the original Baidu SERP page open, encouraging the user to return to Baidu, perhaps resulting in more click-throughs.
- Click Behavior – Speaking of click-throughs, many believe Baidu uses click-through behavior as a ranking factor, tracking which results were clicked on, and if the user returned to the SERP to click on multiple results, so they can work out the best results based on clicking behavior.
- Content Freshness – Baidu places higher importance to freshness of content, while Google may place higher emphasis on the authority of the page.
- Quantity Over Quality – In terms of links, Baidu’s algorithm is a bit more “old school Google”, in that authority is based more on popularity than trust. In this way, the quantity of links is much more important than the quality of the links, as Baidu is less sophisticated in determining quality.
- Improving Slowly – Recently, however, Baidu has been getting better at determining link quality, and they’ve just released another update to their ‘money plant’ algorithm, which is cracks down on the buying and selling of links.
- Baidu is for China – Baidu is almost exclusively targeted at Mainland China. Therefore, it greatly favors content from the Mainland. If you want your site to rank, be sure it’s hosted on a .cn ccTLD, on a server within China, and in Simplified Chinese text. Similarly, you’ll want your backlinks to also come from other sites in China, as links from other countries count for significantly less, or may never get indexed at all. Lastly, be sure to steer clear of any sensitive content that could trigger China’s censors, as this is a surefire way to get removed from the index.
- Need for Speed – Baidu greatly considers site speed in its ranking algorithm. Be sure to keep your page load times down.
- Indexation – Getting your pages indexed by Baidu is much more of a challenge than in Google. While marginally helpful in Google, submitting your site to Baidu will help greatly in getting your site indexed more thoroughly.
- Crawlability – Baidu’s spider is not quite as sophisticated as Google’s. Keep your site structure simple, including steering clear of content in JavaScript, Flash, iFrames, or other hard-to-spider content.
- Meta Tags – While not counted in ranking algorithms in Google, the meta keywords and meta description tags still play an important role for Baidu.
SERP Layout
Baidu’s SERP layout is similar to Google in that there is PPC on the right hand side and adverts at the top. However, there are some key differences which everyone who is optimizing for Baidu should be aware of when it comes to the organic search results, and how they alter the SERP.
Simply put, Baidu squeezes out organic results on page 1 in favor of paid results and Baidu’s own web properties. In the image below, you can see only four organic results (shown in pink) on page 1 for the query “computers”, none of which are above the fold.
Firstly, the Baidu’s own properties are displayed in almost exactly the same way as the organic results, the only difference being a small bit of underlined grey text next to the url.
Baidu has many, many of its own properties which it often places at the top of organic search results. Some of the most frequently encountered include:
- Baike – Means “Encyclopedia”, Baidu’s version of Wikipedia
- Zhidao – Means “To Know” or “Knowledge”, similar to Yahoo Answers
- Wunku – Large article database
- Tieba – Blogging community where everyone can contribute
These properties push organic listings down when they appear in SERPs, so while you may be rank as the #1 organic result for a keyword, it’s quite often the case that your result is still far below the fold.
Baidu Open is a platform in which site owners can build a widget and submit your own data feed. Although this does not affect organic search. Baidu may or may not decide to display the widget based on the keywords used. Popular widgets include vertical searches (e.g. for plane tickets) or weather forecasts.
Finally there is a result type called “Brand Zone”, available for brands to purchase their own trademarked keywords to dominate the SERP of branded terms. As you can see in the image below, these results can include media such as videos, tabbed content, and more. Due to their massive size, Brand Zone results can drastically alter the appearance of the SERP, and mean less space for organic results. Essentially, Brand Zone ads make it extremely difficult to rank on page 1 for a competitors’ brand terms.
Here you can see that Dior’s brand zone takes up almost all of the space above the fold. Again, something to be aware of when optimizing for certain keywords.
Similarly, there is something called Brand Landmark. While Brand Zone is only available for an organizations’ own trademarked terms, Brand Landmarks can also be purchased for more generic terms. These will appear in the right sidebar, but also feature rich content, such as videos.
Not Just A Google Copy
You can see that whilst on the surface Baidu may look just like it is a Chinese replica of Google, if you look just a little bit closer, you can see major differences exist between the two search engines. Not just in the algorithm, but the layout of search results pages, which will have an impact on a companies website performance. Webmasters and marketers entering this market need to be aware of these differences in order to gain the best results.
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