A Can question

Can an SEO company optimize for Baidu?

3 min read Cites 2 sources

Some can, but Baidu work is a separate discipline from Google SEO, and a company that is good at one may have no practical experience of the other. Reaching searchers in mainland China involves Baidu’s own webmaster platform, content written in Simplified Chinese by people who write it natively, China’s rules for websites that provide internet information services, and decisions about hosting and partners in the country. Before hiring, ask whether the company has done Baidu projects itself, who in its team or network does the China-side work, and how it handles the regulatory steps.

Baidu has its own toolset

Baidu runs its own platform for site owners, the Baidu Search Resource Platform, with tools for submitting pages for indexing, mobile adaptation, submitting dead links, and checking index volume, crawl frequency, crawl errors, and robots rules, plus a tool for site revisions. The platform and its guidance are in Chinese. A company offering Baidu SEO should be able to show you how it works in this platform, not only describe what it would do on Google Search Console.

The regulatory side

China’s State Council issued the Measures for the Administration of Internet Information Services in 2000. In the text as first published, which the Shanghai Municipal Government publishes on its website, Article 4 requires a license for commercial internet information services and a filing for non-commercial ones, and says that without the license or the filing, internet information services may not be provided. Article 12 requires the license or filing number to be shown prominently on the website’s homepage; the footer of Baidu’s own platform shows one. The current version and how it applies to your business are questions for an adviser qualified in China. This is general information, not legal advice.

For an SEO company, the practical questions are who would hold the filing for your site, whether you need a Chinese entity or partner to make it, and how long it would take. A company that cannot explain its approach to these questions is not ready to run a Baidu project.

Content and hosting

Content has to be written for readers in mainland China in Simplified Chinese, by native writers or with native review, with keyword research done in Chinese rather than translated from your English terms. Ask where the company would host the site or deliver it from and how it would test load speed for users in mainland China, and how that choice relates to the filing. Content published there must also comply with Chinese rules on what may be published, which a company should be able to explain before it writes anything.

How companies provide it

Companies that offer Baidu work do it in one of three ways: a team of their own with China-market experience, a named partner agency or local team that they coordinate, or not at all. The first two can work, provided the people doing the Baidu work have done it before and you know who they are. Ask for examples of past Baidu projects, who wrote and reviewed the Chinese content, and how the filing and hosting were handled. If a company promises Baidu results but cannot answer those questions, it is not equipped for the work.

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