How do China perceive a com/cn address?

[CoGri]

This post is deleted!

[TomRayner]

Hi Thomas

In terms of Baidu, having a chinese domain, like .cn or .com.cn and having Chinese servers certainly helps - but it is not a necessity in terms of ranking on the search engine.

However, proving that you have a Chinese presence, specifically a physical Chinese address, can be a real game-breaker, especially for PPC.  You basically need to have a Chinese registered address to advertise on Baidu for PPC and Paid search.  Your application will be halted until you do.

I would be inclined to think that, for SEO, having an actual Chinese server and perhaps domain may have more of an influence in helping the site rank in Baidu than having a TLD and country server would for, say, Google UK or US.  However, a .com/cn/ subfolder can work for SEO and it won't flag up any problems.  PPC comes under more stringent testing.

Hope this helps.

[CoGri]

Hi Tom,

As always I'm very grateful for your input. I was told that the Chinese Authorities did not like .com websites using subfolders to target Chinese consumers. However, this was not a credible source and thought I should ask on the Moz community.

By the way, congratulations on becoming one of the top 10 influencers in the Moz community!

Always enjoy reading your thoughts,

Many thanks,

Tom

[CoGri]

Can you recommend anyone to host a website with in China?

[DarwinChinaSEO]

Dear Thomas and Tom,

Based in China, let me share a few things that we've learned regarding the question.

For PPC, harder but not impossible to get ADs running if you do not have a local business location in China. If you contact Baidu AD sales in Hong Kong or Singapore I think you will find that this restriction is not as strictly enforced. I've had a few clients who were able to overcome this using this method.  Cannot say it works 100% of the time but worth a try.

For SEO, serving in China is very important since due to government related content filtering, anything that is hosted outside of China is considered a content risk and therefore your SEO rankings will be downgraded.  Also, if you host outside even aside from the filtering if the load speed is too slow you will have serious indexation issues.

Now where the local registration becomes more important is acquiring an internet content publishing (ICP)... see example on Baidu.com.  You can only receive this via an individual who has a Chinese National ID. This is another factor that Baidu looks for when choosing the ranking of your websites.

Hope this helps!