According to Baidu’s recent official announcement, the search engine is planning to launch an algorithm update in early May 2018 – Breeze 2.0 (Qingfeng 2.0 in Chinese Pinyin). And this is a severer action after Breeze Algorithm (one important algorithm update among all Baidu’s search algorithm updates) against chaotic app marketing tactics on Chinese internet in recent years.
Breeze 2.0 will be targeting fake download information and links, and offending websites would see permanent bans.
Baidu specially reminded webmasters of such sites to perform self-inspection and site reformation.
Two major types of fake downloads are to be banned on Baidu by Breeze 2.0:
1. Discrepancy between actual download resources and user needs.
For example, some websites present download of “novels”, but the download button actually points to an app.
And some pages appear to offer download of app A, but actually it would be app B.
2. Invalid download resources on pages titled “xxx download”.
This is also very common on many Chinese websites, they claimed in titles that they provide downloads of some popular games, movies, novels or apps, but when people click on the download link they provide, the pages would show “no resource”, or such links would even jump to some other websites.
Furthermore, Baidu emphasized that any webpages’ title and description must fit the download resources they actually provide. Any premise on downloads will be regarded as unfriendly to users and could cause penalties from the search engine.
Baidu doesn’t provide any self-inspection tool for this algorithm update, but such issues would be very obvious and easy for webmasters to identify.