Baidu: Webmaster Tools Overview and Guidelines
Agenda Introduction Register Data Submission Domain Transfer Monitor Web Analytics Mobile 2
Introduction
What is Baidu Baidu is the leading search engine in China. It has nearly 80% market share in China and China is the second biggest search engine market after the US. A considerable number of English searches come from these Chinese users, and the number of English searches is on the increase. 4
Register
Baidu Webmaster Tools Registration Claiming your Baidu account: - Email address or +86 Chinese mobile number - Set up password - Enter the Captcha If you used an email address for registration, you will get an email for activation. Click the link in your email and follow the steps. If you have registered with mobile number, complete the registration process by verifying your mobile number. 6
Add Your Website Now you can login to your Baidu account by going to the homepage of Baidu webmaster tools - http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/ You will see a similar screen as shown on the left. Click on Add Site button and put in your home page URL. The next step is to verify. 7
Verify Your Website Ownership You have 3 options for site verification: - Download a file and upload to your root folder Verify Website File Validation Verify Help - Put the HTML Meta Tag to your top page between <head> and </head> HTML Tag Verification CNAME Verification Complete Verification - Verify with a CNAME record added to your domain s DNS area under the name zz.baidu.com Once you have verified using one of these options, click Complete 8
Site Manager Once you are verified, your site will be added to Site Manager automatically. This is your overview where you can see all your sites and you have options to: - Add more sites - View site details - Delete a Site You can also view your messages like DNS errors or increase in page not found, etc. 9
Data Submission
Sitemap Submission Submitting sitemaps in Baidu is similar to Google: - Prepare your Sitemap in these accepted formats text and xml - Sitemap file size should neither exceed 50,000 URLs nor exceed 10 MB - Upload the Sitemap in your site s root directory - Ensure the site for which you are submitting Sitemap is verified successfully in your account - Ensure there isn t any Chinese characters in your Sitemap 11
Dead Links Submission There are 3 ways to submit your dead links to Baidu to remove it from their index quickly - File Submission - Setup a 404 page not found redirect for all your dead links - Consolidate all your dead links and create a dead links file - Dead links file format is also same similar to Sitemap file formats text or xml - Ensure the site you are going to submit dead links is already verified - Regular Expression Submission Dead Links are your 404 or Page not Found links resulted due to change in URL or domain transfer. - Submit a formula ended with / or? - Template Submission - For pages which gets expired content - Copy code provided by Baidu and paste into the code of every page which you want to remove, between <head> and </head> - You could submit only one page as a template for those pages with the same type 12
Individual URL Submission Similar to Sitemap and Dead Links, URL submission allows you to submit individual URLs to Baidu for quick indexing. - - http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/linksubmit/url 13
Domain Transfer
Domain Transfer Site Configuration section provides Domain Transfer tool which allows you to accelerate the indexing of your new site when you transfer your old site to a new domain: - Set up 301 redirects for your old content and ensure it redirects to your new content - Verify the new site in your account - Use this tool to notify Baidu about your new site 15
Website Analysis
Links Analysis Links Analysis can not only tell you the dead links on your site but also shows the number of links pointing to your site from other sites. 17
Indexed Pages This feature shows the number of pages indexed by Baidu. - Baidu does index English sites but it gives preference to Chinese sites and sites that are hosted on servers located in China - So, if your site is in English, it may take a longer time to be indexed by Baidu based on the popularity of your site 18
Search Keywords These are the keywords used for which your site was shown in the search results. Basically, keywords, impressions and click-through rates as well as average ranking. 19
Optimization Tips Baidu has a page optimization tool: - You can submit important URLs from your site and receive tips on how to correct any errors, if found 20
Crawling Similar to Google, Baidu also shows the Crawl Errors or Exceptions and these could be 404s or other server errors. You can also set the crawl rate for the Baidu crawler. 21
Robots.txt You can not only check to see if your site has an existing Robots.txt file but you can also generate one for your site. 22
Security Detection Baidu has a security detection tool which can check your site for Malware for free. In fact, Baidu search results shows your website with a message that This site may be a security risk if affected by Malware so you can later check the tool for details. Baidu also has a tool to check your site for vulnerabilities like Page Source code leak, SQL injection, etc. so you can take appropriate actions. 23
Baidu Analytics Baidu also provides a free website analytics tool called Baidu Statistics to measure: - Site Traffic - Conversions A number of reports can be generated from this tool, for example: - Trend Analysis - Source Analysis - Visitor Analysis 24
Structured Data Baidu has their own version of Schema.org supporting Structured Data: - http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/schema/index They only support Q&A, online documents like PDFs, Software and Document downloads. 25
Mobile
Mobile Crawler Baidu has a Mobile crawler and it may take several months for them to crawl your mobile site and to start displaying it in Mobile search. Ensure you use their Mobile Adaptation feature to submit your mobile site that corresponds to your desktop page. 27
Site App Baidu also has a free mobile app creator. Webmasters can create a free mobile site and they can sync it with their desktop site. Baidu app store is free and easy to use. However, they do closed testing and apps require to be whitelisted before being featured. 28
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