SEO differences between Google and Baidu

1 - Server location

Comparing to Google, Baidu take in account the server’s location. It promotes chinese hosted website against foreign website.

5 - Language

On Google, your position on the SERP will be different depending on the language of your website. You will be better ranked on Google.fr if your website is french etc. And if you want to be generally well ranked all over the globe your website must be in english … However you will still be lower ranked than the websites from where the search request is sent.

As far Baidu is a chinese only website, the only language which is taken in account is chinese. “taken in account” really means that other languages or ignored by Baidu. It’s nearly impossible to be well ranked on Baidu’s SERP if your website is in another language.

Some companies will help you to enter the chinese marketing by multiple solutions from SEO in China to brand naming in China.

2 - Censorship

As chinese government still have a strong policy about internet, you won’t be allowed to post about subjects like politics, events such as those of Tien an men and sexy / pornographic content. Sometimes censorshop could be harsh and a domain name could be banned during one year only for a slight reference about the beauty of chinese girls for example.

3 - Keyword stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an habit which was popular back in early 2000’ which consist in stuffing the page of keywords in every war possible. First there was the meta tag “keywords” which was then ignored by Google. Keyword stuffing is now considered as a bad pratice for Google but that’s not the cause for it’s chinese equivalent.

Baidu does not penalized website for keyword stuffing. If you could read chinese, you will see on Baidu’s results pages that website title and description are note full sentences but often a list of keywords.

4 - Quantity of backlinks V.S quality

Google penalize poor quality backlinks. That’s why nowadays backlinks farms and online links directories tend to be more and more useless.

It seems that Baidu is stuck in the past and still appreciate huge quantity of backlinks no matter their quality. The more backlinks you will get, the more your page will be well ranked on Baidu’s SERP. Link farms and black hat SEO works perfectly for this search engine. However, keep in mind that links from foreign countries, foreign languages and from website which are censored by the chinese governement are not taken in account.

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