In Baidu’s official guide on SEO, it has clearly stated that any approaches taking advantages of strategic flaws of Baidu’s Search Algorithms would be regarded as cheating.
Such cheating behaviors aim to obtain organic rankings inconsistent with corresponding pages’ quality and would cause decline of search quality and bad user experiences on Baidu.
Black-hat SEO techniques to avoid:
Baidu claimed that cheating means could be infinite and listed some typical actions as follows:
- To hack a normal website via its bugs and embed cheating content secretly into the website, in order to gain traffic from Baidu and steal user information through trojans.
- To make a counterfeit of a renowned company’s official website and provide no security guarantees for user transactions on the website.
- To use channels like BSP, BBS and classified information sites to release fake customer service telephone numbers of famous companies and defraud users who call the number.
- To mass send messages via Web2.0 channels of BSP and BBS sites, and the message content is just meaningless gathering of keywords, in order to lead users to download dangerous trojan programs.
What are the penalties against cheating actions?
Any behaviors that harm user benefits and search quality would be punished by Baidu, and Baidu is continuously updating its countermeasures against the latest cheating actions.
Baidu adheres to the principle of “Light penalties to light offenses and heavy penalties to heavy offenses”.
As for actions not severely affecting user experience and search quality, Baidu would eliminate the site’s authority obtained through cheating behaviors; and as for actions severely affecting the experience and the quality, Baidu would not only eliminate the authority gained through cheating, but also lower authority of the whole website, until its pages are thoroughly removed from Baidu’s search results.
Could such penalties be removed?
Baidu stated that it always welcomes those websites who withdraw their cheating behaviors, and it would automatically inspect cheating websites in a periodic way. After a certain period of observation period, Baidu would remove penalties on most websites who correct its cheating approaches.