Channel: Industry Search Engine Land SEM Industry: Conferences SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX SMX & DMD Alerts Uncategorized

Learn from the Pros: See Who’s Speaking at SMX West and Save $200

Search Engine Land

More than 80 of the world’s most knowledgeable internet marketers will present at Search Engine Land’s SMX West conference, March 11-13 in San Jose, CA. You’ll learn what makes them successful, what keeps them up at night, and what to expect from digital marketing in the next year. You’ll…

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Channel: SEO Google Link Penalties Link Building Link Building: General link penalties Link Week Column Search Engine Land traditional link building Uncategorized

Will Link Building Soon Be A Thing Of The Past?

Casie Gillette

The other day while working on a client proposal, I came to the section about link building and had to pause. While everything we include in a proposal is relevant, strategic, and in my opinion, a good tactic, I wasn’t sure I wanted to position it as link building. As someone who has been…

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Baidu’s Zeitgeist 2013: stats and trends

Luke Richards

Globally, Baidu is the second biggest search engine with around 19% of market share after Google. In China, it accounts for more than 63% of the market – that’s more than 200m unique users.

So what were these 200m+ users looking for in 2013? According to China Internet Watch, fantasy literature has really dominated the engine over the year:

Top 10 search keywords on Baidu during 2013 

1. Weather

2. Taobao

3. Wu Dong Qian Kun

4. The Tang Door

5. Mang Huang Ji

6. Zhe Tian

7. Double Chromosphere

8. Baidu

9. Da Zhu Zai

10. Qzone

Five out of Baidu’s top 10 search terms during 2013 (‘Wu Dong Qian Kun,’ ‘The Tang Door,’ ‘Mang Huang Ji,’ ‘Zhe Tian’ and ‘Da Zhu Zai’) are all related to literature. In fact, they are all online novels which can be read at sites such as Qidian.com. 

Massive online names, Taobao (ecommerce) and Qzone (social media) also feature in the Top 10. But it is ‘weather’ which grabs the number one spot, due in no small part to smog problems in areas such as Shanghai and Beijing – sometimes lasting over a week and affecting millions of people.

In fact, climatic worries were at the forefront of the minds of searchers across channels and devices, with Taobao reporting in December that ‘hazy weather’ was the biggest keyphrase they were seeing across their site in 2013. ‘Weather,’ additionally, was the top term searched for from Chinese mobiles. 

Top 10 mobile search keywords on Baidu during 2013 

  1. Weather
  2. Train Ticket
  3. Lottery
  4. Gold Price
  5. Constellation
  6. Translation
  7. Oneiromancy
  8. Express Delivery
  9. Traffic Violation
  10. Check Time

Baidu sees 130m people use the service from mobile devices every day. While the weather was clearly a subject many Chinese citizens wanted a handle on throughout 2013, the chance of winning the lottery also saw big search activity.

‘Lottery’ ranked as the third highest term in mobile searches while also proving big on desktop devices where users are searching for lottery name: ‘Double Chromosphere.’

Alongside the popularity of Taobao on desktop, ‘Express Delivery’ also reflected the growth in Chinese online retail during 2013 – with many consumers keen to track their express delivery orders on their mobile devices.

One key difference between popular Baidu search terms and those on Google UK is that Chinese consumers often look for things which are inherently linked to digital or online culture such as online books, social media and ecommerce sites.

This contrasts with the celebrities and events we see in the top trending Google UK list, i.e. Nelson Mandela and the Grand National.

A complex set of reasons will be causing these search differences between China and the UK. Aside from the variations between cultural and social habits, the differing ways Google and Baidu choose to present content and the lengths at which the government are able to control certain content will be affecting what users look for and what they find.

For more information check out our Baidu Search Best Practice Guide and our China: Digital Marketing Landscape Report. And, of course, these stats and trends, as well as a wealth of Christmas ecommerce data can be found in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.

Baidu’s Zeitgeist 2013: stats and trends

Luke Richards

Globally, Baidu is the second biggest search engine with around 19% of market share after Google. In China, it accounts for more than 63% of the market – that’s more than 200m unique users.

So what were these 200m+ users looking for in 2013? According to China Internet Watch, fantasy literature has really dominated the engine over the year:

Top 10 search keywords on Baidu during 2013 

1. Weather

2. Taobao

3. Wu Dong Qian Kun

4. The Tang Door

5. Mang Huang Ji

6. Zhe Tian

7. Double Chromosphere

8. Baidu

9. Da Zhu Zai

10. Qzone

Five out of Baidu’s top 10 search terms during 2013 (‘Wu Dong Qian Kun,’ ‘The Tang Door,’ ‘Mang Huang Ji,’ ‘Zhe Tian’ and ‘Da Zhu Zai’) are all related to literature. In fact, they are all online novels which can be read at sites such as Qidian.com. 

Massive online names, Taobao (ecommerce) and Qzone (social media) also feature in the Top 10. But it is ‘weather’ which grabs the number one spot, due in no small part to smog problems in areas such as Shanghai and Beijing – sometimes lasting over a week and affecting millions of people.

In fact, climatic worries were at the forefront of the minds of searchers across channels and devices, with Taobao reporting in December that ‘hazy weather’ was the biggest keyphrase they were seeing across their site in 2013. ‘Weather,’ additionally, was the top term searched for from Chinese mobiles. 

Top 10 mobile search keywords on Baidu during 2013 

  1. Weather
  2. Train Ticket
  3. Lottery
  4. Gold Price
  5. Constellation
  6. Translation
  7. Oneiromancy
  8. Express Delivery
  9. Traffic Violation
  10. Check Time

Baidu sees 130m people use the service from mobile devices every day. While the weather was clearly a subject many Chinese citizens wanted a handle on throughout 2013, the chance of winning the lottery also saw big search activity.

‘Lottery’ ranked as the third highest term in mobile searches while also proving big on desktop devices where users are searching for lottery name: ‘Double Chromosphere.’

Alongside the popularity of Taobao on desktop, ‘Express Delivery’ also reflected the growth in Chinese online retail during 2013 – with many consumers keen to track their express delivery orders on their mobile devices.

One key difference between popular Baidu search terms and those on Google UK is that Chinese consumers often look for things which are inherently linked to digital or online culture such as online books, social media and ecommerce sites.

This contrasts with the celebrities and events we see in the top trending Google UK list, i.e. Nelson Mandela and the Grand National.

A complex set of reasons will be causing these search differences between China and the UK. Aside from the variations between cultural and social habits, the differing ways Google and Baidu choose to present content and the lengths at which the government are able to control certain content will be affecting what users look for and what they find.

For more information check out our Baidu Search Best Practice Guide and our China: Digital Marketing Landscape Report. And, of course, these stats and trends, as well as a wealth of Christmas ecommerce data can be found in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.

Channel: Retail Google google plas Google Product Listing Ads Google shopping Google: AdWords Google: AdWords: Product Listing Ads Google: Google Shopping paid search trends Search Ads: Product Ads Search Engine Land Top News Uncategorized

Marin: 40 Percent Of Google PLA Clicks To Come From Smartphones By Dec 2014

Ginny Marvin

By now it’s clear that retailers made record investments in Google product listing ads (PLAs) in Q4 2013, as reports from Covario, RKG and IgnitionOne have each shown. Today, Marin Software released its own findings which reinforce the general consensus that PLA performance this past holiday…

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Web spam

SEOs and Content Marketers Rationalize Their Guest Blogging as Not Spam

Michael Martinez

“Not Spam” is what you call a Web marketing technique that you believe is somehow NOT in violation of search engine guidelines; therefore, if it’s “not spam” it must be acceptable to search engines. We have had “Not Spam” for years but the search engine optimization and “content marketing” communities have been especially devoted to the cause of justifying and rationalizing “Not Spam” since late 2009 or early 2010 (about the time they finally had to let go of their dear, departed PageRank Sculpting). So yesterday Matt Cutts said that Guest Blogging is dead and people should stop doing this. Then he saw that many people were getting all funky in the social media sphere and he added a clarifying paragraph which, sadly, is about to create a whole new generation of “Not Spam”. Only, I fear that this new “Not Spam” will be more toxic than the last wave of “Not Spam” because it will be fundamentally falsely labeled. It really will be spam. At issue is what Matt was trying to say: Don’t use guest blogging any more as a link building technique for search engine optimization. Matt’s original post was fine. The usual collection of doubts, fears, […]