Since the birth of Bear Paw Account (Xiongzhanghao, 熊掌号) in November 2017, Baidu has been trying its best to promote this new media platform, and site owners and SEOs are among its major target users.
The name Xiongzhang (bear paw) originates from Baidu’s logo, and in Chinese culture, bear paw is a precious food – there is a saying that “you cannot have both bear paw and fish” (which is similar to English saying of “You cannot eat your cake and have it”).
However, given the meaning of “bear paw”, the Bear Paw Account is still confusing for its target users.
Baidu was obviously shocked by the powerful spreading capacity of content in WeChat Official Accounts – many single articles on these personal or business accounts could attract more than 100,000 viewers in several hours, and the worse is many popular bloggers have completely switched to WeChat Official Account by abandoning their websites.
By launching Bear Paw Account, Baidu tries to combine advantages of WeChat Official Account (微信公众号) – people can follow any accounts they find interesting, and charms of SEO.
But the problem is, could the myth of WeChat Official Account be reproduced? And could those who stick to their websites be easily persuaded to migrate to any other platform? On their websites, site owners or SEOs could put everything under control and grasp their own content resources tight, but on any accounts, they would have to obey various rules for an uncertain future.
Nevertheless, Baidu seems to get to the heart of this problem – improved rankings and views of content, instead of ordinary rankings of pages.
In the past half a year, the company constantly claims that compared to ordinary websites, Bear Paw Accounts would enjoy better rankings and thus could get more traffic to their content.
Other benefits include:
- Content on such accounts would be indexed sooner and their original content would enjoy better protection – Baidu hasn’t been doing well in protecting originality compared to Google.
- Users could be guided from their content to relevant businesses directly.
- Formatted mobile pages that fit mobile devices.
In its Q1 2018 Results – Earnings Call Transcript, Baidu’s CEO Robin Yanhong Li boasted that “Bear Paw Account now cover approximately 30% of Baidu Search results, resulting in a better search experience for Baidu App users”.
But in fact, I seldom see any content from Bear Paw accounts in my daily Baidu search results; in contrast, Baidu’s other products – like Baidu Tieba (themed forums) – are frequently shown. Maybe Bear Paw accounts are more often seen on Baidu App instead of browsers? That doesn’t make sense either because search results of a same search engine shouldn’t vary with tools.
What’s the future of Baidu’s Bear Paw account? This question will take time to be answered -it’s only half a year old. But Baidu has seen a succession of failures in recently years, especially in the field of mobile internet, from shut-down of 91 WuXian bought for 1.9 billion USD – a top Android app store in China at the time of acquisition, to the failing of “Light Apps” project, Baidu has never got a blockbuster for mobile devices.
Writing by Jinray – Jinray is a professional marketing agency from China, which adopts sophisticated but safe and healthy SEO tactics combined with content marketing.