What are Baidu's top ranking factors?

[alfredopalconit]

I never tried to rank for Baidu before. What do you think are the best practices to dominate on China's most popular search engine (72% market share based from http://yfrog.com/h28asuaj)?

[DavidKauzlaric]

http://www.seo.com/blog/ranking-well-in-the-baidu-search-engine/

Let me know if that helps!

[alfredopalconit]

Yes, saw this earlier. Thanks

But how about your personal experience ranking for Baidu?

[DarwinChinaSEO]

Alfredo - welcome to the wild, wacky world of China SEO.

First and foremost, the link David provided is generally right but in terms of some basic (June 2009... plus a link to a 2007 post) but the content at this time is quite OUTDATED!

One factor that was highlighted which I do think is quite important is hosting in China. I have copy / pasted a response to a similar question in Quora I answered in Jan. 2011.  Things are still changing with Baidu algo but this should still be relevant...

_Question 1: Are Sites hosted in China with an ICP license automatically ranked higher? _Simply stated, if you do NOT have an ICP (Internet Content Publishing??) license in China you can and should expect to receive a poor ranking from Baidu.

This is a market condition of China. The government holds Baidu, Sina and all online publishers responsible for the content they publish. In Baidu's case, if your content based website does not have an easy to find ICP license, your rank will be impacted because it's not safe for Baidu (or Google) to highly rank a site that has not been screened.

Question 2: Do subdomains on high traffic sites (xyz.163.com) do better than low traffic sites (xyz.com)?

There is no right answer to this question because a well optimized subdomain can rank very well it attracts good traffic and link authority. In general, domains with keywords in the domain name are given some weight rank.

_Question 3: What is the usefulness of XML sitemaps on Baidu? _
Not much at present on Baidu-- but that could change. Baidu and Google are both quite dynamic, though recently I believe that Google Places and Local focus will have a more direct impact on regularly updated, tagged content than (relatively static) sitemaps.

Other Advice:
_I would also add that local hosting is also highly recommended as Baidu will be less willing to highly rank content that is hosted out of China. Same principle as above in that content hosted outside of China is more likely to include topics that could cause Baidu problems.

A second issue (that is true for Search Spiders in general, but especially so for Baidu) is that websites hosted outside china can have real problems (seen this on a few MNC clients) slow speed of page access will cause Baidu spider to give up before they index your pages. No pages in index = no traffic.

Know how many paid ads are being shown on the left side for Baidu and prioritize your keyword traffic expectations accordingly. Anyone can buy traffic and we certainly recommend you buy and build (SEM + SEO) search traffic because holistic approach is what delivers the highest ROI._

[lredfield]

Useful and so appreciated.  Thanks!

[JamesNorquay]

Interesting I have been doing bits and pieces of SEO for Baidu recently, was looking for more information.