Compared to Google, Baidu is often belittled by Chinese netizens, although it has become almost the only one reliable search engine available in China. And here are some typical differences between Baidu and Google in respect of SEO:
- Compared to Google, Baidu is very slow and narrow in crawling and indexing websites;
- Compared to Google, Baidu is much less capable of identifying and treating original content, although Baidu has been trying hard to do it well;
- Compared to Google, Baidu is not good at resisting cheating, including autoclickers, link spamming and rewritten content;
- Baidu has been slow and conservative in handling 301 in years.
However, Baidu is now doing good in one thing compared to Google – communication with webmasters and SEO groups in recent years.
Google’s communication with SEO community becomes more and more conservative since Matt Cutts left. When webmasters and monitor tools see significant change of rankings and traffic, Google never make any statements now, not to mention to reveal any algorithm name. And a common official saying from Google now is that Google’s algorithms update every day.
Google’s explanation to this is that it’s useless to know any algorithm update for webmasters, and the most important thing is to make a great website. Well, as a specialized content optimization team from China, Jinray SEO cannot agree more.
In contrast, Baidu seemed totally indifferent to SEOs when Matt Cutts talked to SEOs positively. Ten years ago, no one from Baidu attended any SEO meetings, no one from Baidu reveal any information on algorithms on any forums, and no one from Baidu make any statements about SEO. As a result, Chinese webmasters assumed that Baidu was against SEO. But this wasn’t really true, Baidu’s engineers also attended some gatherings secretly a dozen years ago.
And things became clear after Baidu opened its “Baidu Webmaster Club” on its own forum product – Baidu Tieba in 2010. Baidu has been actively talking to webmasters since then. Now the club has been upgraded to “Baidu Webmaster Platform” with various utility tools. And staff from the platform are active on webmaster conferences like Madcon and China SEO List. They would also publish algorithm updates and names, such as Breeze and earlier Hurricane, Skynet and Ice Bucket.
All these were unimaginable before.