For example, on Baidu:

1. You can do a quick manual submission here: http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/linksubmit/url

2. You can submit your sitemap in Baidu Webmaster Tools. However, please note Baidu sitemap submission requires a Baidu Webmaster Tools account with the privilege of sitemap submission, which is not available to the public yet.

But this summer, Baidu introduced a fancier yet kind of geeky way of URL submission – bulk submission via the direct submission API.

By utilizing Baidu’s direct submission API, webmasters don’t have to sit there waiting for Baidu to come to your site and find new URLs on your site any more – now you can directly push new URLs to Baidu, which can potentially make the indexation process much quicker.

Isn’t that cool? Okay, we have created a simple guide to help you get started quickly.

Overview

First, you need a Baidu Webmaster Tools account. Baidu assigns each webmaster tools account a unique token, which is part of the request URL for URL submission.

You can find you own access token by going to “链接提交” in your BWT account.

For example, if your website is www.a.com, your access URL will be something like:

http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token

How to Use the API – Sample Codes

1. Curl Example
Put the URLs in a file named urls.txt. One URL per line.

curl -H 'Content-Type:text/plain' --data-binary @urls.txt "http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token"

2. HTTP Post Method Example

POST /urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: curl/7.12.1 
Host: data.zz.baidu.com 
Content-Type: text/plain 
Content-Length: 83 
http://www.a.com/1.html
http://www.a.com/2.html

3. PHP Example

$urls = array(
    'http://www.a.com/1.html',
    'http://www.a.com/2.html',
);
$api = 'http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token';
$ch = curl_init();
$options =  array(
    CURLOPT_URL => $api,
    CURLOPT_POST => true,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS =>implode("\n", $urls),
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array('Content-Type: text/plain'),
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
echo $result;

4. Ruby Example

require 'net/http'
urls = ['http://www.a.com/1.html', 'http://www.a.com/2.html']
uri = URI.parse('http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token')
req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri.request_uri)
req.body = urls.join("\n")
req.content_type = 'text/plain'
res = Net::HTTP.start(uri.hostname, uri.port) { |http| http.request(req) }
puts res.body

5. Python Example

import requests

seed_file = open('urls.txt', 'r')
urllist = '\n'.join(seed_file.readlines())

r = requests.post(
"http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.a.com&token=your-private-token",
data=urllist,
headers={'content-type':'text/plain'})

print r.text

Responses

1. Successful submission

{
    "remain":4999998,
    "success":2,
    "not_same_site":[],
    "not_valid":[]
}

2. Failed submission

{
    "error":401,
    "message":"token is not valid"
}

Using WordPress or Discuz?

To simplify the URL submission process, Baidu has released official plugins for WordPress and Discuz. The plugins not only submit the site’s URLs to Baidu, but also make the submitted data in a Baidu-friendly way.

You can grab the plugins here: http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/dataplug/

This not only brings people better search accuracy, but also makes the web much safer and reduces the risk of online fraud, such as phishing scams.

But for Baidu, that is not the case.

Sometimes it can still be a challenge to have good rankings for branded keywords on Baidu, especially when your brand name is very popular, when other people also target your branded keywords, or very unpopular, when there is not enough searches for the brand name so Baidu doesn’t have much user data for it.

Below are some common cases:

1. When your brand name is another more trusted websites’s product name. For example, your run a hotel, and your hotel’s brand name is also listed on a large hotel booking website such as eLong and Ctrip.
2. When another website targets your brand name, with better user experience for Baidu searchers.
3. Yellow pages that set up an “official” website/landing page without your authorization.

Organic traffic generated by branded keywords usually comes from other marketing channels and is of better traffic health – at least it means the searchers are already interested in your company, right? So failing to acquire this traffic can result in significant losses to your brand.

In this post I will share some common approaches we take to secure navigational searches on Baidu.

1. Join Baidu Trust (Baidu Official Site Program)

Baidu Trust is one of Baidu’s efforts to improve search accuracy for navigational searches. It works in quite a dummy way: you submit your business information such as the tax id and the business license to Baidu, proving you are the real owner of the website.

Baidu charges 600 yuan per year for Baidu Trust and it is still limited to businesses registered in China, with valid business licenses.

2. Put the brand name at important places on the website

Putting keywords at important places on a website is a common SEO practice and can give the website a better chance of good rankings.

The same, of course, also applies to branded keywords.

Places such as page titles, the logo alt tag, the footer, the homeage, the about us page, and the contact us page all sound like ideal containers for branded keywords.

3. Include the ICP license no. in footer

This has never been disclosed publicly by Baidu, but we have confirmed with a former Baidu engineer privately that having the ICP license number on the website improves the domain’s trust with Baidu and is a positive ranking factor.

However, how much weight this signal carries is still a mystery. I think it should be a weak signal, but why not if you have one?

4. Use the brand name as the anchor text when building links

When developing backlinks for a website, it’s important to diversify the anchor text and use your brand name and the variants as the anchor text for some of the backlinks.

This not only helps maintain a healthy link profile and reduce the risk of over optimization, but also improves the site’s rankings for the branded keywords.

Although there is not a universal anchor text distribution guide, it’s a good idea to analyze that of the high ranking websites from your industry, using backlink analysis tools such as Open Site Explorer.

Finally, I hope you will never have to find this post useful

Not having the deserved rankings for your own branded keywords can’t be regarded as lucky from the perspective of SEO. You will find this post useful when you are from the unlucky side, but let’s just hope that never happens.

What’s your story about Baidu navigational searches? Is it a still headache for you to rank for branded keywords on Baidu? Your comments are always welcomed.

————

In August Google announced HTTPS as a new ranking signal, and since then I have seen a lot of websites, not only websites that collect sensitive user information such as online stores, but also sites that don’t, including blogs and enterprise websites, have adopted HTTPS.

However, if China is one of your target market and Baidu is where a large portion of your organic traffic comes from, you may want to have a second thought.

How Does Baidu Handle Sites with HTTPS?

In general, Baidu doesn’t crawl HTTPS sites.

This may be bad news but unless you are a big website, by which I mean influential, popular and/or having a lot of pages and traffic, Baidu’s HTTPS crawl budget allocated to you is nothing better than zero.

So if you really need to enable HTTPS on your site, please read on.

How to Optimize HTTPS Sites for Baidu

Since Baidu doesn’t crawl HTTPS sites, “optimizing” here means serving different content to Baiduspider and human visitors.

Below is the way officially recommended by Baidu:

Step 1 – create a http version of your HTTPS site. Be sure to let them have duplicate content, to avoid the risk of cloaking;

Step 2 – configure your server to let it serve the HTTP version to Baiduspider, but HTTPS to human visitors.

Step 3 – when people come to your site from Baidu’s SERPs, be sure to 301 redirect them from the HTTP version back to HTTPS.

For example, you need to add the following lines to the .htaccess file on your server:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baiduspider
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Baiduspider
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s pretty much what you need to do when you want to enable HTTPS across your site without losing organic traffic from Baidu. Of course don’t forget to pay attention to your server logs so you know dummy Baiduspider crawls your site right.

Having more questions about optimizing HTTPS sites for Baidu? Why not leave a comment or give us a poke here?

This can be quite annoying when you already have a mobile or responsive website.

Luckily, there are three simple ways to stop the madness:

Option 1: Cache-Control: no-transform

This directive can be either used as an HTTP response header or a meta tag as below:

<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-transform " />

Option 2: media=“handheld”

For those who already have mobile sites, they can specify the addresses of their mobile sites, by adding the following line within the head section of the page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.wap.xhtml+xml" media="handheld" href="your-mobile-site-address"/> 

Just replace your-mobile-site-address with the real address of your mobile site.

Option 3: User-Agent Specific Settings

The user-agent of Baidu’s transcoder is Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; baidu Transcoder;) , so you can let your server return the mobile site specifically to this user-agent.

Be sure to add Content-Type: vnd.wap.xhtml+xml in the response.

So the three methods above can save your site from being blindly converted by Baidu. If you have other problems with Baidu-dummy-spider, why not leave a comment below or drop us a line?

I assume Pinyin may kill a large portion of our readers, so first let me make sure you don’t confuse Baidu Zhida (Baidu Non-stop Train) with Baidu Zhidao (Baidu Knows), the Q&A platform.

So, what’s Baidu Zhida?

Baidu Zhida is based on Baidu Light App, a free mobile site/app creation tool with basic features as well as advanced protocols. You can not only use the existing templates and modules of Baidu Light App to create a very functional mobile site, but also leverage the APIs for more powerful features.

What makes Baidu Zhida special is by inputting “@your-company-name” in the search box of Baidu Mobile, users can directly go to the official mobile site of your company, instead of the normal mobile search result page.

Will Baidu Zhida be a success?

My answer is yes.

I’m quite optimistic about the future of Baidu Zhida and Baidu Light App, because Baidu Zhida really solves the pains of enterprises, especially small businesses, at least in two ways:

1. Zero or low-cost mobile site creation solutions. By using Baidu Light App, you can create a functional HTML5 site/app in ten minutes, without sucking up to your IT guys or coughing up money to hire a web design company.
2. Since users can directly go to your official mobile site by searching “@your-company-name”, your cost of brand keywords in Baidu pay-per-click advertising will decrease.

Why Baidu wants you to get a mobile site free?

Because Baidu’s main source of revenue is Baidu pay-per-click advertising. By giving business owners free mobile sites, Baidu will see more companies, who previously don’t have mobile sites and are reluctant to try Baidu PPC on mobile devices, start to investing (more).

How to get your own Baidu Zhida account?

For now, Baidu Zhida is still invitation-only. But I think it will be soon available to everyone, as mobile is one of the strategic focuses of today’s Baidu.

If you are an impatient guy like me, you can request an invitation by emailing ext_zhida@baidu.com, in the following format:

Subject: 申请直达号邀请码—Your Company Name

Content: Company name, company introduction, main contact, and phone number.

Everyday I am being asked a lot of questions about Internet stuff in China, especially questions about Chinese search engines, both at work and off work. One of the topics I have been asked about most is accusations or misunderstandings about Baidu.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m in no defence of Baidu, and to me, Baidu is far from being an enterprise that fulfils its social responsibility.

I am writing this post, simply because sometimes I see people misunderstand, or wrong Baidu, and it’s worth demystifying it.

Below are the three most common misunderstandings about Baidu:

You have to pay Baidu to let your site rank

False, if you mean organic search results.

I guess this accusation is somewhat subconsciously related to China’s infamous corruption and bribery issues.

You don’t have to pay Baidu to let your website rank on Baidu. And, I don’t think there is a way to pay Baidu to let their core search engineer team tweak their billion dollar machine, only to give you special treatment.

You need a .cn domain and a China-based server.

Not necessarily.

I don’t have detailed market share data for domain extensions in China, but below are the Alexa top 10 Chinese websites:

You can see the majority use .com domains, and only 2 use .cn domains.

A China-based server usually equals better access speed than overseas hosted websites. But again, it’s an advantage, rather than a must for Baidu.

Baidu ranks its own products higher

This is a tricky question that can not be answered by true or false.

It is not rare to see Baidu’s own products, such as Baidu Zhidao and Baidu Wiki, have good rankings on Baidu. But does that mean there is “guanxi” under the table?

Not necessarily, because Baidu Zhidao and Baidu Wiki usually have quality content that satisfy the needs of Baidu’s users, so why shouldn’t they have good rankings?

Got your own questions about Baidu or Internet stuff in China? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I am happy to share my thoughts.

Moreover, a new victim has joined the list this time – Google Fonts.

Google Fonts is a free font service that makes it very easy to integrate beautiful and cross-browser fonts into websites.

However, with it blocked in China, although your website has installed Google Fonts, it will not work properly on your site.

What’s worse, your site’s load speed will also be affected, because your website contains an external source that is blocked and takes very long to load.

So How to Fix This Mess?

Luckily, fixing this is easy. Qihoo 360 has offered a free mirror of Google Fonts on their own CDN servers across China.

For example, below is the original code on your site:

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Then you can simply change it to the following, to switch to Qihoo 360’s mirror:

<link href='http://fonts.useso.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Now your site will be even faster to your Chinese audience, since the new css and font files are on 360’s own CDN in China.

Yesterday I shared the slides below at a small local meetup, covering 8 rules that we think the most important for WeChat marketing.

Feel free to check it out:

Whether you are an experienced WeChat marketer or are just about to get on WeChat, your comments are always welcomed.

Although today’s search engines have much stronger and more intelligent text analysis abilities, webpage parsing can still be a challenge in many cases, given the fact that the websites and web apps are becoming increasingly complicated.

That’s why search engines so love microdata.

However, not like search engines like Google, Bing and other advocates for microdata, Baidu goes another way – it extends the Sitemap protocol with a series of XML tags and elements, and encourages webmasters to submit their content using the new standards, with the latest move of releasing a structured data plugin for WordPress.

Instead of inserting microdata markup to your WordPress site, Baidu’s plugin automatically creates Baidu-friendly Sitemap files and informs Baiduspider to crawl them.

The URL of the Sitemap file is something similar as below.

/wp-content/plugins/baidusubmit/sitemap.php?m=indexinc&p=xxxxxxxxxx

A glimpse of the source codes

So if your Chinese website is based on WordPress, you may want to give the plugin a try.

Download the plugin: http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/dataplug/index

Since this plugin is newly released, you are very welcomed to share your thoughts, experience and issues, and Shifu will be happy to have discussions with you.

As the leading Chinese search engine on both PC and mobile devices, it would be insane for Baidu to ignore the demands of better user experience from this huge number of user base. So in 2013, Baidu has released quite a few guidelines, tools and articles to help webmasters standardize the optimization efforts for Baidu Mobile.

This article will serve as a definitive guide to Baidu mobile optimization, covering the rules, tools and best practices. If you are planing to optimize your website for Baidu Mobile, keep this article under your pillow.

Do You Have a Mobile Site?

Situation 1: You don’t have a mobile site.

First, the good news is you don’t have to have a mobile site to do optimization for Baidu Mobile. Baidu has released a tool called SiteApp, which can help you create an app-like mobile site based on the desktop version of your website.

This option suits small businesses that don’t have an extra budget for creating a mobile site or making the desktop website responsive.

And it’s pretty obvious that another option for those without a mobile site is just creating one, or making the existing PC site more responsive to suit the screen sizes of mobile devices.

Situation 2: You have a mobile site.

If you have a mobile website, it’s important to let Baidu distinguish it from the desktop site and properly display it in the search results of Baidu Mobile. Below are three ways to achieve this, to make Baidu’s and your lives easier:

Option 1 – you do the heavy lifting yourself

You will need to properly configure your server to let it recognize mobile devices and mobile crawlers. The easiest way is to detect the user agent. For example, the user agent name of Baidu’s mobile crawler is Baiduspider, the same with its desktop crawler. That of Google’s mobile crawler is Googlebot-Mobile, which is different than the name of its desktop crawler.

This can also be achieved by adding extra client-side Javascript or jQuery codes. I don’t recommend this method because this may only work for your mobile visitors but not search engine crawlers, as how web crawlers handle (complicated) Javascript codes is still a myth.

To make this easier, Baidu has also released an API for standardized device-detection. You can read more here: 百度终端适配服务 (The API document is in Chinese and doesn’t have an English version yet).

Option 2 – meta tag

Option 2 is a simpler one that most SEOs should be good at – adding meta tags to thesection of the PC web pages.

<meta name=”mobile-agent”content=”format=[wml|xhtml|html5]; url=url”>

If a PC page on your site has a corresponding mobile page, you can use the meta tag above to inform Baidu.

Here is an example:

<head>
<meta name=”mobile-agent” content=”format=html5;url=http://mobile-site.com/your-corresponding-mobile-page”>
……
</head>

Option 3 – sitemap

Using sitemap to inform Baidu of the relationships between the PC pages and mobile pages is another option. Baidu has released a detailed guide on how to adjust your sitemap file to meet the standards.

Baidu Mobile Optimization Recommendations

So you have a mobile/responsive site and Baidu can distinguish it. Now we need to optimize it for Baidu Mobile.

Baidu has released an official mobile SEO guide and below is the English version translated by Chinese SEO Shifu. We have omitted some common recommendations like “use a short domain name so visitors can remember it more easily”. Please also note we have not done quantitative tests to proof all the recommendations from Baidu can actually benefit your mobile SEO performance on Baidu, so please make choices based on your own wisdom.

Baidu Mobile Optimization V1.1

1. Make sure your robots.txt file doesn’t block Baiduspider. The mobile user agent of Baidu is still Baiduspider, not Baiduspider-mobile.

2. Use sub-domains or directories or organize your content, to make it have a clear structure.

3. Use the keywords meta tag for the home page and important directory pages.

4. Use the description meta tag for the home page and important directory pages.

5. Reduce or avoid broken links, and ensure the pages give correct status codes.

6. Use a home <–> directory <–> article flat content structure for your website.

7. Use breadcrumb navigations.

8. Write clear page title. For example:

homepage: site name_service or product description

directory page: directory name_site name

article page: article title_directory name_site name

9. Don’t use too many subdomains. For example, some online communities give each user a suddomain like username.a.com. Don’t do that.

10. Links a web page point to should give 200 status codes. Try avoiding errors and redirections.

11. When you are changing the domain, it is ideal you keep the URL structure unchanged. For example, you are changing from a.com to b.com. Old pages like a.com/abc/abc.html should be permanently redirected to b.com/abc/abc.html

12. Use correct DOCTYPE declarations, so search engines crawlers can detect if the web pages are suitable for mobile devices. For example, xhtml mobile sites can use the following DOCTYPE:

<!DOCTYPE  html  PUBLIC  "-//WAPFORUM//DTD  XHTML  Mobile  1.0//EN"  "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/xhtml-mobile10.dtd">

WML mobile sites:

<!DOCTYPE  wml  PUBLIC  "-//WAPFORUM//DTD  WML  1.1//EN"  "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

HTML5 mobile sites:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

And here is the original Chinese version by Baidu of the mobile SEO guide in Chinese.

Summary

In general, to do mobile SEO for Baidu, if you already have a mobile site, you need to let Baidu recognize it first by using meta tags, sitemap or configuring your servers; If you don’t have a mobile site, then you can use Baidu’s SiteApp tool to quickly create one, or make your PC site more responsive to suit mobile devices.

After that, you can check the above mobile SEO recommendations from Baidu and work on your mobile site.