Mobile users are sometimes forced to initiate or download an app to continue viewing further content while visiting a web page via search engine, which can be quite annoying to users. 

Take one of the popular audio sharing platform Ximalaya as an example:

When a user enters the website via mobile search, it interrupts the user journey and forces the users to download or use the mobile app. Baidu mobile search will significantly lower the rankings of such pages; so, companies should avoid implementing such practices.

Optimizing for Baidu Mobile Search

Domains and servers. Baidu recommends simple and short domain names as they are easier for remember. Businesses should select stable and good performing servers. Baidu also recommends fully-responsive HTML5 designs to build websites. Keep in mind that page loading speed is a very important ranking factor.

Machine readable. Baidu crawls, processes, and indexes mobile web pages via Baiduspider2.0. Currently, Baiduspider can only understand text content and may have difficulty extracting content and links from flash, images, ajax, iframe, and javascript. Use “alt” tag on images.

Flat structure. Baidu recommends mobile sites should have a clear structure and shallow link depth, which allow users to quickly obtain useful information and search engines to quickly understand the structure level. Tree structures are recommended in three levels: homepage » category » details page.

Linking. The ideal site structure is flat tree structure, from the home page to the content page level as little depth as possible. Every page should link to the upper-level page, the next level page, and pages with related content. Important web pages should be near the home page.

In addition, breadcrumb navigation is also important to have for mobile websites.

External links are important for mobile page rankings, including links from PC only pages to mobile pages. Be reminded poor quality external links have a negative impact on your Baidu rankings. You can use Baidu Webmasters to analyze the external links.

URL structure. If your website designs different pages specifically for mobile users, Baidu recommends the use of mobile home page with m.a.com/3g.a.com/wap.a.com (the use of subdirectory such as www.a.com/m/ is not recommended), category pages with m.a.com/n1/、m.a.com/n2/ (it’s better if n1 and n2 can be directly accessed). Details pages should have simple and shorter URLs with few parameters. Different pages with the same content should use 301 Redirect to one unique URL.

Anchor text. The simpler the description of the anchor text is written, the easier it is for the user to understand the purpose of the page. The user discovers that your page is a link from other pages, and the anchor text is the only introduction Baiduspider understands the page.

Anchor text must be accurate; and, incorrect descriptions could get your page penalized.

Tools. You can use Baidu Webmasters to submit a mobile sitemap, check mobile indexing status, and submit 404 removed pages.

If Baidu could not locate proper mobile pages, it will create a transformed mobile page for better user experience. However, it’s not as good as fully responsive HTML5 designed web pages.

Page Title. You should have unique and relevant title for each mobile page, limited to 17 Chinese characters. If more than 17 characters in title, it will be forced to two rows or removed when it’s over 24 characters. Keep the most important words in the beginning of the title. If your brand is well known in China, keep your brand in the title.

Meta data.

Having a unique “description” tag for each page is important. You should also use “applicable-device” tag to inform Baidu of your website mobile adaption status:

• If your web pages are only good for desktop browsing, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”pc”>
• If your web pages are only good for mobile devices, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”mobile”>
• If your website uses fully-responsive design, add <meta name=”applicable-device” content=”pc,mobile”>

For local content, you can use geo meta tag; for example, if your website targets users in Beijing, you can use “location” meta tag:

<meta name=”location” content=”province=北京;city=北京; coord=116.306522891,40.0555055968″>

Coord is the latitude and longitude coordinates of the page information.

Content design. Baidu recommends 14pt font size for main content (no smaller than 10px), and line spacing of (0.42~0.6)*font size (no lower than 0.2*font size).

If the main content contains multiple images, the images should be set to uniform width and positions. When the content contains multiple text links, the recommended font size is 14px and 13px for the vertical spacing. If the font size is 16px, the vertical spacing recommended is 14px. The clickable text links area is no smaller than 40px

Related post: Baidu version of Google AMP

Baidu Union, Baidu version of AdSense, launched a new tool for publishers to monetize images on their websites.

Image Plus matches the images with relevant content network ads in one of three types of displaying styles:

• Overlay display
• Expanding display from top right
• Icon floating display

Baidu Image Plus ads won’t be activated on more than three images on the same page.

Baidu was committed to improving internet environment. To provide better search result, Baidu has updated its algorithm for 7 times in 2013.

• 2013-2 Baidu launched a algorithm named Scindapsus Aureus to avoid hyperlink cheating. About 2 billion cheating pages were influenced, including intermediary, sellers and buyers of hyperlink.
• 2013-5 Baidu algorithm updated to Pomegranate, to decrease poor pages with spam. About 2.7 billion low quality pages were influenced. These websites had lots of poor pop-up advertisement, or content covered by advertisement.
• 2013-5 Algorithm were updated to improving the rank of original content. The websites which collected content from other sites used to be the top, so original content websites were hard to get profit. After updating, 5.2 billion pages including collection websites and false original websites were hit.
• 2013-7 Baidu launched Scindapsus Aureus Algorithm 2.0 to reduce advertorial promotion. The update influenced 1.6 billion news page.
• 2013-7 New algorithm managed to punish the websites selling second-level domains and directories. 1.2 billion pages were influenced.
• 2013-9 Baidu update algorithm to deal with batch produced results of static research, influencing 0.8 billion pages.
• 2013-12 The Pomegranate algorithm 2.0 were launched to improve the quality of search result. About 3.8 billion pages were influenced by the new algorithm.

Baidu has released top search terms report by December 2013, now another report showed the search contents rank list. In 2013, the top 5 most-searched contents were film & TV, commodity supply & demand, education, game and travel, according to a report released by Baidu. The demand for education, travel, film & TV increased significantly in 2013. Baidu suggested webmasters paid attention to these field.

Education mainly refers to the demand for education resources, including course ware, course recommendation, professional examinations information, training institution and so on. Webmasters may integrate information about professional examinations to provide one-stop service for users. In terms of course ware and recommendation, websites could segment users according to their vocation and demand, then provide them with specific information.

The demand for travel included the source of destination recommendation, tickets booking, hotel reservation and travel note. Different user groups varied in characteristic, interest and demand. There are noteworthy differences for webmasters.

Film & TV resources included online video, video download, film review, variety shows, micro film and so on. The resources can be deeply integrated by relationship between films and actors. The content construction of information about film & TV is also important for webmasters.

Baidu recently released 2014 China Website Development Report. In this report, Baidu revealed some facts about mobile search.

Mobile search brought large revenue for Baidu. What did people search on mobile in 2013? Literal content was still in demand, for being convenient and costing little traffic. This might be a good news for webmasters of small and medium size websites. 

The demand for high quality reading source, life service, tool service and online inquiries remained strong. And the demand for life service, tool &  inquiries, health and education increased in 2013; however China websites were lack of high quality source in these field.

Most mobile websites were not spider-friendly. In other words, the search engine optimization of mobile websites was low. Non-standard page and no mobile redirect for Baidu mobile UA (user agent) were the main reasons why spider failed to grab mobile web pages. These two reasons accounted for over 70% of ineffective grab. Baidu suggested mobile websites should use separate domain names. Baidu also encouraged webmasters to use Html 5.

Baidu Webmaster Tools, compared to Google Webmaster Tools, are very basic and premature providing six tools for webmasters:

1. Sitemap Submission to Baidu

Webmasters can use Sitemap tool to submit their sitemap to Baidu to help Baidu spider to better understand the website structure and content. Strangely, this tool is still not available for public at the moment.  However, you can apply for one by sending a request email to: zhanzhang@baidu.com

Once Sitemap tool is activated, the first step is to verify the ownership of the website by either downloading and uploading a verification file or adding a meta tag in the header section.

Once your website is verified, you can proceed to submit your sitemap by selecting the sitemap type (regular sitemap or product sitemap), update frequency and sitemap URL.

Each sitemap you submit to Baidu can be in standard XML format or text format (one URL per line), including up to 50,000 URLs and it can not exceed 10M (uncompressed). Both UTF-8 and GBK encoding are supported.

If your website has multiple sitemaps, you can submit a sitemap index file.

You can also submit a URL removal request from Baidu via Sitemap tool (yes, you need to block the URL from being crawled in robots.txt or return “404” code) and diagnose your website problems encountered when Baidu spider crawls your site.

2. Ping

You can access this tool directly here without logging to Baidu Webmaster Platform. You can submit your website URL or RSS feed address. This is not necessary if your website is already indexed.

If you have a Chinese blog, this is Baidu Ping address that would be helpful to you: http://ping.baidu.com/ping/RPC2

3. Optimization Recommendation

You can submit important pages of your website (or any websites) to get search engine optimization recommendations. The bad news is, you can only submit one URL at a time.

As shown in the above diagnosis of Google China’s daily deal aggregation homepage, this tool provides basic optimization recommendations on six areas:

1. The length of URL. The recommended length from Baidu is 256 bytes.
2. Dynamic parameters on static pages. This is to prevent repeated crawling of pages with the duplicate content.
3. Meta data. Meta data like META Description is necessary for all search engines.
4. Image ALT information
5. Use of frames. Baidu recommends against the use of frame/frameset/iframe.
6. Text description of Flash files

This tool seems only helpful to those without any SEO knowledge.

4. Security Check

Baidu will display a warning message in the SERP if it finds out your website is hacked or infected with malware. Of course, it doesn’t mean your site is secure even if you don’t see the warning message.

This tool helps you to diagnose the security status of your website. If you site was hacked, you fixed the problem and you still see the warning message after 48 hours, you can submit your complaint here.

5. Search Engine Submission

You can submit your newly launched website domain URL here.

6. Baidu Search Box

You can get code here to embed on your website if integrating a Baidu search box is valuable to your visitors. And, you can also enable Baidu Suggest function which works like Google Suggest.

Baidu Webmaster Tools are very basic at the moment; hopefully it will improve.