Bear Paw Account was the No.1 star product of Baidu in 2018, which was desperately promoted by Baidu via all ways. But its name suddenly disappeared from its official webpage on December 29th, 2018.
This surprising change is confusing countless Chinese website owners, and Baidu hasn’t officially confirmed this yet. On the same day of this change, it was rumored that Baidu’s work team of Bear Paw Account had been dismissed.
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.
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.”
In its Q2 financial results released on August 1st, Baidu announced that its “double-engine” strategy consisting of search and in-feed ads has remained strong, and its AI technology is optimizing the search experience.
It said that as many as 37% searches are satisfied by the first result on Baidu, and 38% among the search results are from quality content of Bear Paw Accounts, which are indexing data from 3.8 billion sources.
The percentage of Bear Paw content among all search results was 30% till the end of May, and according to Baidu’s plan, Bear Paw is expected to contribute 80% of all Baidu search results, achieving the search engine’s goal of “upgrade from websites to accounts”.
Baidu announced yesterday that it will release Monsoon algorithm update in mid June. Different from other algorithm updates released before, Monsoon is targeted solely at Bear Paw accounts which have been advocated by Baidu since November 2017.
According to Baidu, Monsoon focuses on content type deviation of Bear Paw accounts – owners of such accounts must stick to their account types when they create and release posts.
For example, if you don’t select “healthcare” or “medical” when you sign up your account, you couldn’t release any content related to these fields; and you couldn’t release any financial content either in case you haven’t registered your account as a financial one.
Such regulations are probably made to eliminate false information in both fields because there is abundant such information in China and they could cause great loss to their readers.
And since special algorithm update is to be released for Baidu’s own content product, Baidu will probably also treat both medical and financial content on websites differently in a cautious way.
Since the birth of Bear Paw Account (Xiongzhanghao, 熊掌号) in November 2017, Baidu has been trying its best to promote this new media platform, and site owners and SEOs are among its major target users.
The name Xiongzhang (bear paw) originates from Baidu’s logo, and in Chinese culture, bear paw is a precious food – there is a saying that “you cannot have both bear paw and fish” (which is similar to English saying of “You cannot eat your cake and have it”).
However, given the meaning of “bear paw”, the Bear Paw Account is still confusing for its target users.