SEO News

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.

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.

According to Cutts: 

So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well.

Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging as a linkbuilding strategy.

So what does this mean for sites accepting guest blogs? 

We have accepted guest blogs for many years, and in part this has helped us to put out more quality content even with a relatively small writing team. 

We don’t offer links as a thank you for free content, though we do place a link to authors’ websites and social profiles in their blog ‘signature’. This isn’t about links, but instead to provide a way for interested readers to find out more about the author. 

In the light of this latest announcement, we may have to review this policy. 

According to Rishi Lakhani: 

I would go for no follow (on guest blog links). Ideally, I would advise sites NOT to accept a high volume of guest posts at all, especially low quality content. If the post doesn’t add any real value, it’s most likely seen as spam. 

Richard Baxter from SEOGadget advises that sites should be more selective in their choice of guest bloggers: 

One piece of advice we give our clients is that they should be very diligent as to who they are accepting content from. Ask yourself: is the author genuine, do they have a strong social following, and are they perceived as experts in the field they’re offering to write about?

The example guest blogging approach Matt Cutts points to is something obviously spammy, such that I can’t see any respectable site accepting, and the kind of email we would just ignore. 

Still, as we have now expanded our writing team I expect we’ll be a little more cautious over what we accept in future, and I do think it’s better for us to create more of our own content. 

That said, given that we have used guest blogging in the ‘right’ way, I do feel aggrieved that it seems to have been devalued over the past couple of years. 

How will Google deal with ‘quality’ guest blogging? 

Cutts did later add some clarification, pointing out that this was not aimed at ‘multi-author blogs’ and that he doesn’t want to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. 

So how will Google tell the difference between quality and spam in guest blogging? Rishi Lakhani believes all large scale guest blogging is now risky: 

Quality guest blogging would be judged on the merit of the site that the post is on and the relevancy of the content to the recipient link. However I think the spam team will judge the volume of guest blogging – if it’s fairly high as a link building tactic, it’s most likely to be seen as spam. 

But is Google able to tell the difference between good and bad guest blogging? Richard Baxter has his doubts: 

Of course, there is such a thing as quality guest blogging, but I don’t think Google is terribly good at detecting ‘good’, ‘passable’ or ‘bad’ guest posts. Not without incurring a lot of false positives in its results. My general rule is, if people need to debate the quality of a link that’s a sign it’s not great, and it may mean it’s very difficult to detect with machine learning.

As we saw from early Panda and Penguin, there was a great deal of collateral damage (sites penalised that shouldn’t have been and vice versa) and I suspect deeply that a rollout to programmatically detect this type of activity would be exceedingly difficult and harmful to very legitimate websites.

Is guest blogging still valuable? 

I would say yes, though clearly not as a linkbuilding tactic. However, guest blogging shouldn’t just be about gaining links. In our case, we insist on a longer term commitment from guests, and we don’t accept one-off posts. 

For us, guest blogging allows us to publish useful content from a perspective our writing team can’t always provide – from the point of view of a PPC manager working for a big brand for example. 

In return, the guest blogger receives exposure in front of a readership of digital marketing and ecommerce professionals, and a chance to showcase their knowledge and skills. For me, there’s more value in that than a link or two. 

As Cutts says, the lesson here is for publishers to be sceptical about any guest blog approaches, and that single-tactic SEO isn’t where it’s at. Oh. and these guys will need to find another tactic: