You know Baidu but what of its Chinese community?

Baidu and community

The indexing system on Baidu

Through constant development, China now also has had its own search engine for more than 13 years. The latter is called Baidu and to this day, nearly 70% of Chinese Internet users consult it daily.With 600 million netizens this is a place that cannot be outlooked for business Therefore, China is an important market in the world.

The specificities of China

Any company or operator who wants to conquer Chinese buyers must have a well-referenced Baidu website. However, through their experiences, webmasters have found out SEO Baidu and SEO on other search engines are very different. Because of these characteristics, specialists have made it their main activity to allow anyone who wants to have good visibility on Baidu. In fact, besides the language that has always been the key to understanding this country’s obstacle, administrative systems and culture also have their influences are reflected in the research tools and hence positioning systems and SEO.

SEO on Baidu by experts

Whatever the field of activity, it was found that by increasing purchasing power of the Chinese, more and more companies are keen to promote their products on the Chinese sites to take advantage of this bargain. Thus, according to the person or company that handles referrals, 6-10 methods can be proposed.
Different methods of SEO on Baidu

For an efficient SEO strategy, having a fully mandarin translated version of your website is not enough, other parameters must be taken into account to be referenced on Baidu. Also, when designing the site itself, it must be well designed its homepage and the first 5 pages. Thus, besides the design, the text of these pages must be written in clear and concise Chinese. It is better to have the “cn”. Indeed, Baidu will already assign grades to these pages and they are already decisive for positioning. After that, it is good to have several links pointing to your website.Here on Baidu, it is the quantity of links that trumps quality. In addition, do not overlook the fact that plagiarism in all its forms is not punished in China. Thus, for the moment on Baidu you can do a lot of copy-paste without fear of being penalised. Although very stable at the moment compared to Google, you must still keep pushing and doing SEO efforts to avoid being overtaken by competitors the ferocious competition taking place on Baidu

Is Baidu anything but a Chinese Search Engine?

It is true that we talk more and more search engine Baidu to time such but little about the community that revolves around it. It is very likely that the services, very similar to what we find in our country are unknown to you. They are finally here for you

A peek at the Chinese community on Baidu

Baidu Tieba

Launched in 2003, it is the largest Chinese online community that brings together very active members discussing a wide variety of subject. Oddly for China, before 2010, there was an option to leave comments anonymously, leaving just an IP address.

Users can post one video and one picture but cannot their posts. Regarding this feature having an account or not does not factor in. However, users can delete their own post as well as the reactions of other users in response to theirs.

Below is an example of one of Tieba’s top 500 about regional specialties.

What you see at the bottom of the page are users discussions on topics related to the culinary specialities.
They can vote to give credit to a bar which gives it a note. Should a bar ever reach the top 500, he is entitled to his own album (pictures, videos). With that comes of course a very good visibility on Baidu Tieba with a large number of followers. Here on the print screen you can see that this bar has more than 1 million followers and 6 million posts!

Note: a scandal was uncovered involving a site administrator that against a pot of wine accepted that posts be deleted.

Baidu Tupian

Picture identical to Google, the layout, as you can see is very similar. These images have two main origins: the images directly referenced by Baidu or those referenced by Bing through its partnership regarding research typed using letters. The community can vote for the best pictures by clicking on a small star in the bottom right corner of the photo.

Baidu Yinyue

It is a Multimedia platform very interesting for those who want to listen to music on the net. In China it is also a platform that does not necessarily have the rights to broadcast all of its content. However this is changing to align with the wishes of Baidu to have major studios and foreign production on its side to further its growth as a multimedia major. In this sub-service of Baidu, users can choose their favourite music rate it, and thus change the rankings that are on the front page. A Smartphone app is also available to listen, share and rate the music wherever they are. This way they also can keep sharing their tastes with other users. Lastly a VIP access allows you to download music files in a format of highest quality.

Baidu Zhidao or a copy of From Yahoo! QA

Basically it works just like Yahoo!Q/A. A user with a fairly specific question will post it. Then users will post their answers. Once the answers have been posted they are rated by the whole community which let everybody knows what are the best answers for one given topic. These results in turn will show up on Baidu SERP as high quality content. This is how the service makes users become both knowledge makers and consumers.

Baidu Baike : The Chinese Wikipedia

Baidu Baike is the equivalent of Wikipedia but 100% Chinese. There is a community of 15 million Chinese members who writes daily content on a variety of topics. However, contributors and members of Wikipedia have noticed republishing from Wikipedia to baidu baike without citing the source of the content. In addition, multiple copyright infringements were also found

 What can the future be for Baidu community?

As we can see, Baidu is surrounded by a large Chinese community which helps feed the engine giant Chinese research updated content while providing daily use its services through VIP accounts, services content sharing. Yet Baidu is not Facebook or LinkedIn. Baidu community is a set of rather disparate service yet very similar to what would be Google without Google +
What is to ask the following question: Will Baidu also copy the + of Google+ in an effort to centralize data?
Indeed, come to think about it, given the current situation in China regarding private data, Baidu could have easily access to an astronomical amount of data that could then be cross-referenced and analysed to give very accurate information about consumers in its home market . This added to a live observation of what is happening in its community can give the Chinese giant a decisive advantage when it decides to get involved in a market it wishes to enter like recently mobile or Smart phone applications.

Sources

• Baidu
• What is Baidu SEO?