Technical and On-Page SEO Guide for Baidu | Dragon Metrics
Technical and On-Page SEO Guide for Baidu
Simon Lesser
January 17, 2017
Introduction to Technical and On-Page SEO
Technical SEO is all about making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and index your site’s content. Typical areas of focus for technical SEO include site speed, stability, crawler directives, site architecture, code structure, design, compatibility, and security.
The goal of on-page optimization is to make it easier for search engines to understand what each page on the site is about, which will help rank the page for relevant content. This typically means structuring your content in an easy-to-digest way, and using keywords and appropriate content in key areas of the page.
Luckily, technical SEO and On-Page Optimization for Baidu share some similarities with Google. If your site has already been optimized for Google, you’re part of the way towards optimizing your site for Baidu, but there’s still a number of additional considerations to keep in mind.
In this chapter, we’ll cover all of these additional factors, along with our tips and recommendations for optimizing your content for Baidu. In order to concentrate fully on insights for Baidu SEO, we’re going to skip the basics of general-purpose technical SEO and on-page optimization. If you’re looking for some good resources to learn or brush up on the basics, here are some of our favorites:
Step-by-Step “Technical SEO” Checklist from Webris
Technical Site Audit Checklist from Moz
On-Page SEO: Anatomy of a Perfectly Optimized Page from Backlinko
Technical SEO Considerations for Baidu SEO
Hosting in China
Since Baidu targets a primarily Mainland Chinese audience, they typically give preferential treatment to almost everything Chinese. This includes the hosting location of your web servers.
To get the best SEO performance on Baidu, you’ll want to host your site within Mainland China (Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan unfortunately do not count). That’s not to say that sites hosted outside of China will always rank poorly, but local hosting is certainly an advantage.
There are two primarily reasons for this preferential treatment. The first is that hosting in Mainland China is a strong signal that the site is targeting the local Chinese market. The second is due to the Great Firewall. Many sites outside of Mainland China, and thus outside the Great Firewall, load much more slowly than domestic sites, and may not always be reachable. As Baidu is tasked with returning sites in their search results that are fast and reliable to local users, this puts foreign sites at a great disadvantage.
ICP License / Bei An / 备案
If you want to host websites in China, you will need an Internet Content Provider (ICP) License, there are two types:
Individual ICP License – Requires Chinese state-issued personal ID. Cannot be used to host commercial or business websites
Business ICP License – Requires a China Business Registration
There are extra requirements you’ll need in order to get approval from the government, such as a local physical addresses, phone number etc.
For details on how to obtain an ICP license, TutsPlus has a great guide
The ICP license number is typically listed in the footer of every website hosted in China. These numbers can be looked up in the Chinese government’s portal for more information about the license holder.
How an ICP License Can Improve SEO
Baidu has never mentioned ICP licenses in SEO publications, so there’s no sure way to know if having an ICP license is a ranking factor in Baidu. However, we believe that an ICP license will indirectly help a website on Baidu in the long run. The main reasons are:
- An ICP license is required to host sites on a server in China. Locally hosted websites are typically much faster and stable domestically, which contributes to direct ranking factors such as crawlability, site speed and user experience
- Many advanced site verification procedures in China (such as Baidu Trust) require a ICP license. These verifications unlock additional badges or widgets that display on the SERP for the site. Besides building authority and trust, these badges can improve click-through rate, which many believe indirectly contributes to higher rankings.
.CN Top-Level Domain
.cn is the country code top level domain (ccTLD) of China. Based on our experience, Baidu will not give .cn domains ranking priority. In fact, the usage of .cn domains isn’t even necessarily a popular choice for local companies either (look at Baidu .*.com.) However, when it’s feasible, we still recommend using the .cn domain instead of a subfolder or subdomain. Here’s why:
- Using a .cn domain will be a signal to Baidu that your .cn domain is intended for the local Mainland China audience.
- Unlike top level domains and subdomains, subfolders are not considered separate sites. Placing your China website in a subfolder is a signal to search engines that this is a “part of your site” and not a site of its own.
- As a single-market search engine, Baidu doesn’t support the hreflang tag for international targeting. In our experience, we have found Baidu is not as capable in handling multilingual sites as Google, and may often waste crawl budget on non-Chinese parts of the site which have low value on Baidu. This can negatively affect the number of Chinese language pages that are indexed.
- Although not a direct ranking signal itself, a .cn domain can help you rank better in Baidu in long run by influencing other direct ranking signals. Having a .cn domain is an instantly-recognizable signal to a Chinese visitor that this website is created specifically for them, leading to higher popularity and more backlinks.
- Registering a .cn domain in China does not require local business registration for now, but this could change in the future, so it’s good to take advantage of this as soon as possible.
- .cn domains are often cheaper than .com domains
Getting a .cn domain only requires a Chinese ID, which is considerably easier than hosting in China or getting an ICP license. However hosting in China and obtaining a ICP license will have a much higher value for SEO than a .cn domain.
China Accessibility and Speed
The Great Firewall of China (GFW) is a blanket term used to describe internet censorship in China. Sites that publish politically sensitive content, self-publishing platforms such as social media sites hosted outside of China, or content deemed inappropriate by the Chinese government (gambling, pornography, etc.) are typically blocked in China by the Great Firewall. Many of the top sites in the world, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia (in Chinese), and The New York Times are all inaccessible everywhere in Mainland China.
Even foreign sites with no political or controversial topics are not fully safe from the Great Firewall. All sites hosted outside of China may be slow to reach or intermittently inaccessible at times. This can vary based on the time of the year, with more disruptions near politically sensitive events in China. In 2014, an entire CDN was blocked in China, making thousands of innocent websites inaccessible.
Before doing any China SEO for any foreign websites, it’s a good idea to check if the site is blocked in China.
GreatFire.org Analyzer is a very useful tool to check if a website’s been blocked in China.
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in China
If your site loads slowly in China, leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) could be a good solution. However, the cost and complexity of setting up CDN in China are relatively high compared to other options. If you are willing to invest in setting up a business and doing SEO in China for the long run, this could be a useful option.
Advantages of Using a CDN for SEO
- Better user experience due to faster load times and stable connections
- Increased crawlability for search engines, due to speed and stability improvements
- Increased security against some types of hacking, such as DDoS attacks
- All of these factors may lead to Higher rankings through direct and indirect factors
Selecting a good CDN provider is extremely important. Below are 3 main categories of China CDN services, their benefits, and the most popular vendors within each category.
Local CDN in China
A local CDN is ideal if you are looking to set up a dedicated CDN service for users in China only. This type of CDN services usually have the best performance in China. The most popular China based CDN providers are:
Global CDN
Global CDN providers that provide good coverage in China may work well for websites that need a global CDN network that cover more than just China. However, do keep in mind that the Chinese government can decide to block a global CDN without warning or cause. Unless you are convinced the CDN is really too big to fail, it may be better to stay with local CDN providers.
Some of the most popular ones are:
HTTPS in Baidu
The adoption rate of HTTPS is much slower in China than in the US or UK. It wasn’t until 2015 when Baidu finally announced their full support in crawling and indexing HTTPS sites. Later, in summer 2016, they announced an updated crawler with improved abilities in handling HTTPS.
Similar to Google, Baidu claims to give HTTPS websites a small ranking boost. However, at this stage we still think Baidu’s support of HTTPS is still not mature enough for webmasters to make the switch, as the risks still outweigh the potential benefits.
Common pitfalls
Here are a few common mistakes international websites often make when trying to target China:
JavaScript-Based Content Loading
Although many search engine crawlers have gotten better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is much less likely to process JavaScript than Google. In fact, in Baidu’s own SEO College, the search engines says they do not process any content in JavaScript. Therefore, implementing any site content in JavaScript for Baidu is absolutely not recommended. This includes AJAX content, JavaScript links, language switchers in JavaScript, or anything else that hides content or links in JavaScript.
Using Hosted Libraries Outside of China
It’s a common practice to load popular Javascript libraries like jQuery or Bootstrap from a CDN hosted by Google or other large companies in the West to leverage browser caching and improve site speed. However, very often these CDNs can be blocked or throttled in China, and will cause your site to load slowly, incorrectly, or not at all — simply for using a single hosted file.
To avoid this issue, we highly recommend loading common libraries from a CDN hosted in China. They’re frequently used, so site visitors may already have them cached in their browser. You can also be sure they will not be blocked or slow down your site.
Optimize Baidu Spider Indexation
There are multiple ways Baidu uses to discover URLs on your website. To ensure maximum indexation, we should make sure we’ve setup everything properly. Fortunately all of these will be fairly easy with a modern CMS.
Optimize Sitemaps for Baidu
A sitemap is a file that contains many or all of the URLs on a site, with metadata about its modified date, change frequency, and priority. A properly set up sitemap can help search engines find all pages on your website and understand your site structure, especially for sites with many URLs. The sitemap format for Baidu is nearly identical to Google, so if you already have a sitemap that is properly formatted for Google (which most modern CMS can generate automatically), you don’t have to worry about tweaking your sitemaps too much for Baidu. Here are 2 main differences in sitemap handling between Baidu and Google.
Sitemap URLs Device Tagging
Baidu has a unique tag they will use to identify whether an URL is designed for desktop, mobile or both devices.
mobile:mobile/ // Mobile pages
<mobile:mobile type=”mobile”/> // Mobile pages
<mobile:mobile type=”pc,mobile”/> // Responsive pages
<mobile:mobile type=”htmladapt”/> // Dynamically served pages
Here’s an example of sitemap entry for a mobile page:
On-Page Optimization
Keyword Placement
As Baidu ranking algorithms are not as advanced as Google, following old school on-page SEO best practices can still yield good results. It’s still important to take care using target keywords and their variants naturally in page content, and not engaging in keyword stuffing.
Learn how to utilize on-page keywords for maximum SEO benefits in this infographic from Backlinko
Optimizing keyword placement within your content will most likely need to be done by native Chinese writers.
Summary
It’s clear there are many additional technical considerations for Baidu SEO in addition to the normal optimizations typically made for Google. Generally speaking, we believe technical and on-page SEO are more important for Baidu SEO than for Google for two main reasons:
- Due to government regulations, SEO performance in China is heavily affected by hosting, server, and legal issues
- Google has more advanced crawling and indexing technology, so they can crawl and understand poorly-optimized websites better than Baidu
Although many of these recommendations can be difficult to implement, they can be the difference between success and failure of your SEO campaign in China.