In recent years, more and more language services agencies in and out of China announced they are providing a new service called “SEO translation”.
However, what is “SEO translation”? Jinray is a language agency specialized in both SEO and translation, but we have to say this is not a good saying and could be confusing and even misleading for professionals.
English posts on SEO for Baidu often contains some wrong ideas, including this one: choose a .CN domain for Chinese market, instead of a .COM one., because the former would be helpful to rankings on Baidu.
An editorial titled “Baidu has Died as a Search Engine” becomes popular on Chinese Internet since last night, and according some Chinese news sites, this article has even caused a drop of 6.4% on Baidu’s stock.
Baidu’s General Manager of “Search Ecology Business” Xie Tian said on Baidu Union Summit held in May: “A new era of Baidu search has come, which sees transformation from websites to accounts, and this is a dimension upgrade.” Similar voices are repeated in promotions of Baidu’s Bear Paw Account.
“The reason why Baidu put so much emphasis on Bear Paw account is that, Baidu still cannot resolve black-hat SEO tactics till today,” writes a SEO from Beijing on his Baijia account, an earlier Baidu account product launched before Bear Paw account.
When I did SEO tasks for overseas clients/PMs, I found it very easy to not tell the truth to the clients or simply cheat them, and meanwhile offer them a perfect-looking sheet with useless or even harmful keywords the clients would never be aware of – I just never do it that way. And this is not only due to language barrier, but because of some specific steps in SEO processes like keyword research.
For example, some acronyms could be very deceptive, like “ECM”. This term is usually used to mean “Enterprise Content Management” in the west, and also “Engine Control Module” in some cases; but in China, things are very different, people mostly use it to refer to the latter, and rarely use it for the former.
It’s known that Baidu doesn’t do a good job in indexing new pages – especially from a new website, or in confirming whether an article is original or plagiarism.
I have a personal Chinese blog on translation, I wrote all the articles by myself for it in the past 6 years, but they still needs to wait for 2 to 4 days after publishing to be indexed by Baidu.
Fortunately, the blog is old and quality enough for Baidu to believe that its content is original, but for those new sites/pages targeting Chinese market, it might take a longer time for Baidu to index and evaluate them, and they would face greater risks of being copied and losing rankings.
Although Baidu continues to claim that more and more of its mobile search results in China are coming from Bear Paw accounts, many webmasters are still confused with this “domain of the mobile era”.
Many of the Chinese webmasters are attracted by Baidu’s great efforts in promoting Bear Paw accounts and are trying to get one such account, but some of them never get approved. This is probably because they don’t really create original and useful content, and obviously, Baidu is trying to boost original content via manual review in the application process of Bear Paw account, apart from its algorithm updates that might don’t work in some circumstances. In its official statement on Bear Paw account, Baidu said, “The launch of Bear Paw accounts marks that the Spring of whitehat SEO comes.”
The possible return of Google to China has become a hot topic among domestic SEOs, and many of them are very optimistic about the news, but famous Chinese SEO expert Zac warned them of the opposite situation today.
Some “SEO instructions” on the internet take using the same content for meta title (title tag) and H1 (header tag) as a problem, and in their opinion, it would be a best practice to use different texts for meta title and H1 tag.
Meta keywords tag was a common practice in SEO for any search engines, but you might not know that it’s been abandoned by most search engines, like Baidu.
Baidu’s engineer LEE, who is in charge of answering questions publicly about SEO, made it clear in August 2012 that meta keywords tag had become a history for Baidu, and Baidu totally ignores it. Here are the screenshots of his words in Chinese during a dialogue with Chinese webmasters: