Based on Baidu’s official materials on quality content, Jinray SEO summarizes following rules for creating of quality content, and you would be able to conclude some sustainable and healthy SEO techniques by reversing them:
1. Useless content
Many companies create content for content’s sake. That means they never consider usefulness of their content or if there is anyone would search for their content.
Remember that useless articles wouldn’t bring any traffic to your website even if they get nice rankings. According to Jinray SEO’s experience, such approaches are very common among overseas enterprises. They often create content for audience from target markets based on needs of their local audience while do no or little investigation for the market in advance . Usually they would just translate their English articles into Chinese, and insert keywords into the translations, but this is not user-friendly at all.
2. Inconsistency between title and body
Baidu suggests that if your theme in title is not consistent with the main body, even if your website gets traffic from organic searches in a short term, such traffic isn’t sustainable.
In the social media era, such inconsistency is very common on Chinese news websites, their goal is to lure visitors to click on the articles, but they neglect how harmful this is to user experience, and Baidu is now taking actions.
3. Long page load time
Long page load time would affect user experience and lower Baiduspider’s evaluation for your website. Baidu has mentioned that mobile pages with a load time more than 3 seconds would be directly determined as a spam page, even if there is any quality content on it. Wearing patience of Baiduspider means it would come less frequently, and thus your website would get less organic traffic from the search engine.
4. Illegible fonts
Some websites present illegible texts, like with a color similar to the webpage background. This is obviously bad for user experience and wouldn’t be deemed as quality content by Baiduspider. Other examples include too small font, too narrow text spacing, etc.
5. Excessive anchor texts
Excessive SEO tactics for Baidu should also be avoided, like too many anchor texts – pointing as many as bold or highlighted keywords to a specific page. Building of internal links should be done in a moderate and reasonable way, keywords or sentences should be highlighted based on user experience and requirement of content themes.
6. Confusing content arrangement
You should always put the most important content at the most important position, instead of placing all paragraphs in a random and confusing way or according to certain SEO techniques. And always put really related articles beneath each post, instead of placing irrelevant content for other purposes.
Relevant content would enhance your page authority and bring more page views.
7. Overflowing ads on pages
Some people like to put many dazzling banners on their websites, this certainly hurts user experience, and Baidu holds the same view. Advertisements should be placed in a restrained and friendly way, to prevent them from disturbing your visitors and show hospitality to Baiduspider.
8. Non-original content
It’s widely known that copied content is not good for SEO, but many Chinese webmasters are still trying their luck. Baidu has been focusing on non-original content for a while, and its Hurricane Algorithm released in July 2017 was specially created to tackle scraped content.
In a word, like any other search engines, Baidu tries to consider everything related to content from a user perspective, and so should websites aiming at Chinese market. But the truth is many Chinese SEO agencies still adopt unhealthy and risky SEO techniques, trying to seek temporary loopholes of Baidu instead of helping client create quality content, as those techniques are all what they are capable of.