How Baidu Determines Link Quality | Dragon Metrics Blog

How Baidu Determines Link Quality

Simon Lesser

June 21, 2013

There’s a lot of talk about backlink quality recently. With the recent rollouts of the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, Google has increasingly been going after link spammers with a vengeance.

But what about Baidu? While some may say that Baidu is less sophisticated than Google in recognizing linkspam, it would be naive to think that Baidu takes a complacent attitude towards those that try to manipulate search results. In a recent blog post Baidu has come out clearly addressing the issue, explaining what they consider to be manipulative link practices, and how they treat sites that engage in such techniques.

A full English translation of the article is available below, but we’ve summarized the main points:

Links Must Be True Recommendations

Baidu clearly states that the only criterion used in determining whether a backlink is questionable is if it represents a true recommendation from the linking website to the target website. Anything else is problematic.

2 Types of Problematic links

Baidu divides questionable backlinks into 2 categories: garbage backlinks and backlink spam.

Garbage backlinks

Links that do not represent true recommendations from the referring site, but are not created intentionally by the target website in order to manipulate search rankings.

Baidu claims that they can identify 98% of these types of links, but since most of these links were machine-generated and were not intended to manipulate search rankings, they will be filtered out during algorithmic calculations, but not result in any penalty or adverse effects to the target site.

Examples of garbage backlinks:

Backlink spam

Links that are created by the target (benefiting) website either manually or programmatically, with the main purpose of deceiving search engines and manipulating search engine rankings.

In addition to detecting and filtering these links, Baidu will also penalize the target website for ownership of such backlink spam.

Examples of backlink spam:

For more details, see the translation below from Baidu’s Webmaster blog.

Determining Backlink Quality

This document is divided into four main content areas:

  1. How to determine whether or not a backlink is problematic – Real-world examples
  2. The difference between two kinds of problematic links: Garbage links and linkspam
  3. A few examples of the most common methods used to create linkspam.
  4. Detailed explanation of linkspamming behavior

1. How to determine whether or not a backlink is problematic – Real-world examples

Baidu only uses a single criterion to determine whether or not a backlink is problematic: Whether or not the link represents a true, honest, and intentional recommendation from the linking website to the target website.

2. The difference between two kinds of problematic links: Garbage links and linkspam

2.1. Garbage links

Linking to a website without the intention to recommend the site: The website owners did not intentionally build the link. This includes but is not limited to: Links on search result pages, links on automatically generated pages on webmaster service sites, links automatically generated through scraping, etc. Baidu is already able to recognize and filter out 98% of these types of links, and these links will not have direct negative consequences for the site.

2.2 Manipulative Linkspam

Using people or machines to build links meant to deliberately trick search engines, with the intent to manipulate search engine rankings to benefit the website owner. Including but not limited to: Anchor text manipulation, buying link authority, hacked links, large quantity, low-quality backlinks, link wheels, etc. These types of links will be filtered out of search results. At the same time, the receiver of these types of links will certainly have action taken against them resulting in direct negative consequences.

2.4. Linkspam Description

Linkspam comes in many different forms, and as time goes on new and different tactics will continue to emerge. However, techniques such as anchor text manipulation, backlinks created with the sole purpose of increasing authority, bulk acquisition of backlinks, and other similar techniques never change.

3. A few examples of what Baidu sees as the most common methods used in creating manipulative linkspam includes but is not limited to:

4. Detailed explanation of linkspamming behavior

4.1 Anchor text manipulation – Detailed explanation:

Large batches of links with artificially created anchor text. For example: Using other well-known website or business as your own anchor text. For example, many Taobao shops or other well-known ecommerce sites using “Taobao” or other well-known brand names for their anchor text in links to their own sites.

4.2 Backlinks created with the sole purpose of increasing authority – Detailed Explanation:
4.2.1 Black-hat injected links:

Exploiting a site’s loopholes, hackers may artificially inject links into a site. In order to not attract users or webmasters’ attention, most of the time these links will be invisible to site visitors. However, they’re easily found by looking at the source code or the site’s logs at the destination URL of outbound links.

4.2.2 Buying and selling links

Once these types of links were commonly known as “Golden links”, “Platinum links” and “Wealth links”. Of course, nowadays buying and selling links is a much more secretive process. Most will never directly label links as “Golden links”.

4.2.3 Link farms

A large number of related sites (the same person creates x number of sites, or one SEO company creates more than one site), often times using a large number of exact match anchor text to make reciprocal links to each other, for the purpose of increasing a site’s ranking.

4.3 Large-scale, low quality backlinks – Detailed Explanation:
4.3.1 Web 2.0
4.3.1.1 Obviously manipulative: Inserting links with keywords into BBS forums or blog posts, such as yellow pages or B2B portal sites.
4.3.1.2 BBS or Forum Signatures:

Making numerous and repeated forum posts with links in the personal signature, often using exact-match anchor text.

4.3.1.3 Anchor text fraud:

Linking to your website using fraudulent anchor text, such as claiming the page is something it is not.

4.3.1.4 Fake reviews which are really advertisements:

In many BBS, forum, or other Web 2.0 type sites, you can usually add links to a post. These kinds of posts have absolutely no connection to the thread topic, and were simply created through machine automation to post articles with links back to the site.

4.3.1.5 Other techniques:

The techniques we’ve listed above are by no means an exhaustive list. However, we believe humans can normally spot the vast majority of them without difficulty.

4.4 Cloaking

Some unscrupulous sites will serve the Baidu spider and other site users different versions of the same page (the content is completely different), or will redirect Baidu spiders to a different page. Strictly speaking, this kind of manipulation is not classified as linkspam, but is still a type of manipulative behavior. Sites that practice cloaking will undoubtably be dealt with very severely by Baidu.

In general, these guidelines shouldn’t be to the surprise of any SEOs. They’re much on par with Google’s linking guidelines, and should be common sense to any white-hat practitioners. Still, the guidelines represent a trend in Baidu’s increasing willingness to engage with the webmaster community and provide more insight and transparency into its updates. It’s a welcomed step in the right direction, and we’re hoping that Baidu is able to continue to increase its detection of linkspam.