Off-site SEO factors for Baidu

 

Backlinks quantity

Surprisingly for some, I start the list of the off-site SEO factors with backlinks quantity and not quality. While Google’s algorithm is manly considering the quality of the backlinks your site receives, but Baidu is rumored to be less sophisticated when analyzing your backlink profile.

As a result, the number of backlinks is an important factor to rank well on Baidu and most backlinks strategies focus on building a high number of backlinks, even if they are of lower quality.

Backlinks quality

On the other hand, the Chinese search engine is introducing more and more algorithm updates, and it’s clear that sooner or later the backlink quality will have a more important role when ranking websites.

My advice is to think in the long term and also consider the quality when you engage in link building on Baidu. Stay away from black-hat practices and risky backlink networks.

Of course, your backlinks should mainly come from websites written in Chinese simplified and you should prefer .cn domains.

Backlinks anchor text

As mentioned above, the anchor text of the backlinks is a very important ranking factor. It’s advised that it includes your targeted keyword(s) and a high number of exact match anchors is still acceptable for Baidu (at some extent, at least).

I hope this shortlist of ranking factors for Baidu is a good beginning to understand what you should focus on when doing SEO for Mainland China.

However, don’t forget that the online habits of Chinese consumers can be very different compared to other countries. For example, being present on Tmall.com, the main e-commerce marketplace in China is even more important than doing SEO for an e-commerce website.

Of course, there are many more differences and specifies to the Chinese search engine that I will be happy to discuss directly with you. Please, leave a comment if you have a question or contact me directly for a seo agency china!