About two years ago, a client from Ukraine approached me through this SEO blog and wanted me to help him optimize his Chinese blog-based website on programming to improve its rankings in Baidu. His website domain name had not been registered long ago and the content was highly similar to many long-standing blogs that can be easily found on Baidu, so I wasn’t too optimistic about his website’s ranking prospects in the short term. I told him this, of course, and said that if he insisted on doing SEO, it would certainly help, but we should pay as much attention to details as possible, just don’t expect to rank highly in the short term.
First, I suggested that he change the domain name that was made up of English words that were a bit too long for Chinese readers, but he didn’t want to do that. I also suggested some other technical improvements, but I can’t remember the details now.
However, the main part of course was to optimize his content, which was what he wanted me to do, I thought. In order to make his online content perfect, I printed out all the content on his website and studied it with a view to optimizing it as much as possible for all keywords, which was an unusual move at the time, and I didn’t have any clients asking for this in my daily work. But since the person found me through this blog, it gave me an extra incentive and I didn’t ask for more money for it.
I reviewed almost all the terminology shown on his site, as well as all the other keywords, and suggested some improvements, including adding different synonyms to a page in a tactful way, but he didn’t seem keen to accept my changes wholesale – he made most of them, but didn’t take all of the keyword suggestions. Perhaps he had doubts about the accuracy of my translations, but apparently, this was unnecessary as I am a professional translator myself and each keyword suggestion was verified through a Baidu search, which I of course explained to him. Or maybe he had some misconceptions about SEO, maybe in his mind, SEO is a magical technique that can bring about a jump in rankings without changing anything. I think so because that’s what many people think.
About two years later, I suddenly thought of him and I looked at the rankings of his website and, unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much traffic from Baidu.
While it wasn’t my fault or my lack of ability to cause it, I still felt a little guilty – I didn’t keep him updated on the effectiveness of black-hat SEO on Baidu rankings. So I wrote an email to him to tell him some new knowledge about Baidu SEO, mainly the so-called “fast ranking” (快排), but I never got a reply from him.
Here is the email without revealing confidential information about the client, and I wish him and his website good luck.
Hi XXX,
Hope you are doing well!
It has been almost two years since our last contact. It’s not easy for a new site to get high rankings on Baidu, especially when there is a lot of competition from sites with similar content.
I’ve always been dismissive of black hat SEO, but this year I learned from multiple sources that a technique known as “fast ranking” has become increasingly popular in China and has proven to be relatively safe.
This technique uses a sophisticated software to simulate manual clicks in order to obtain Baidu rankings. This service is usually charged by the day, and from the ads I’ve received, it doesn’t cost much, maybe 2,000 to 3,000 yuan a month, depending on the number of keywords you need to rank for.
I’m not sending this email to advertise, just to provide you with this potentially useful information as a former partner. To be honest, although I occasionally get ads about Fast Rank, I have not used it myself, so I don’t know which agency is more reliable in this regard. If you are interested, I can help you ask for more details, or you can try to look for them by yourself.
BTW, the Chinese term for this technique is “快排”, I just found this term is even allowed by Baidu as a PPC keyword, this is unbelievable : )