Baidu has changed the name of its “ranking auctions” (Baidu’s “Pay Per Click” business similar to Google AdWords) to “Baidu Marketing”, to avoid disputes on legitimacy of its PPC scenarios.
And as for questions about if Baidu PPC affects a website’s organic search traffic, Baidu’s official answer is no.
“Baidu’s commercial promotion and organic searches are managed via two separate systems by two different departments. Websites joining in PPC enjoy no privileges in organic search results,” said Baidu.
However, there has been rumors that when you spend money on Baidu PPC, you would get better SEO rankings in organic searches.
And some webmasters have claimed that they’ve witnessed such phenomena on their websites, while some others deduced that such effects are not directly caused by using or terminating PPC, or intentionally manipulated by any engineers from Baidu.
Instead, they think this is because when a website has quality content but relatively low rankings, PPC ads would help it get more traffic and thus improve its overall data like bounce rate, page detention time and click rate, and consequently boost the site’s SEO performance. But when people stop using Baidu PPC, the site’s data would drop and then follows decline of organic rankings.
Such deduction seems a bit far-fetched, and there isn’t any clear proof that Baidu PPC would affect a site’s SEO performance, and it’s very common that organic rankings fluctuate.
Such fluctuations are sometimes even deemed as a kind of probe, which aims to test the site owner’s patience and legitimacy, so just focus on your content quality and site building.
And adopt Baidu PPC when necessary – like you urgently need a good amount of traffic and your organic rankings are really low and have little chance to get any significant improvement in a short term.