20 reasons to hate Baidu
20 reasons to hate Baidu
Baidu is the world’s leading search engine in mandarin, and it was recently ranked number 4 on the “BrandZ Top 50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands 2013 Report”
Baidu is the essential platform for everybody who wants to reach its 600 million internet users, or the 420 million smartphone users.
Although the market is now witnessing more competitors, with a new company called Qihoo, which took 10% market share since august 2012 (according to Qihoo).
Baidu :
– Is the leader search engine in China
– Gets 80% revenues of search engines in China
– Represents 40% of total advertising spending in China
– Represents 6 billion searches every day, more than any search engine in a national market
– Has 100 million users of the mobile app “Baidu search”
– Is the 5th world’s most visited website
WHY IS BAIDU HATED?
1. PRIORITY TO CHINESE WEBSITES
Baidu discriminates foreign websites, hosted in foreign countries. This means that most results come from Chinese sources.
Moreover it censors some sensible results for the Chinese government.
2. BAIDU IS COMPLICIT IN THE CENSORSHIP
Baidu works with the Chinese government in order to censor a maximum of websites and special requests. It also gives data to the Chinese government about internet users.
3. BAIDU MIXES NATURAL RESULTS AND PAID RESULTS
Baidu is smart, and mixes natural and paid results on competitive requests. There is a small « 推广 » which indicates advertising while it’s so small that very few people will notice that.
4. BAIDU ONLY BRINGS FORWARD HIS OWN PLATFORMS
If we analyze the majority of the traffic’s results, we see that Baidu’s websites take the first page’s results: Baike (the Wikipedia) and Baidu Zhidao (Q&A), Baidu News, Baidu Jingan (experience), and now Baidu shopping. A study had shown that 23% of Baidu’s traffic was redirected to these websites, monopolizing the results.
5. BAIDU PUNISHES HIS COMPETITORS
For example Taobao and Tmall totally disappeared from the results since Baidu launched its own Baidu shopping.
See this example with the keyword “mobile phone” :
6. A RANDOM TRUST RANK
Baidu evaluates the websites manually and often randomly. It is difficult to know how Baidu rates the websites. Many Chinese SEOers talk about a possible corruption of the rating managers, or fake results if you launch an advertising campaign via Baidu.
7. THE BAIDU BRANDZONE MAKE THE BRANDS PAY
Brands already appear first on their keyword, and Baidu developed a special available zone for these brands, which you need to pay. Of course the results are better, most users looking for a brand being more likely to buy products or stay on the website.
When you do marketing for a brand, you are then stuck: all the other brands and the competitors pay this service, so you don’t have a choice and thus you have to pay too.
Another fact important is that there is no fixed price, no pricing list: the richer and more famous you are, the more you pay.
8. ADVERTISING ON BRAND’S NAME IS AUTHORIZED
Most companied advertise on their competitor’s name.
For example local companies do Pay Per Click on the “LV” keyword:
The first shop offers LV bags at very low prices: 1960 Yuan instead of 10 000 Yuan.
It is hard to know if they’re fake or not ![;)]()
The second shop offers bags from other brands, Gucci for example in the case the customers are undecided.
It is not unusual that even big foreign brands advertise on their competitor’s names.
For example for the “Dior” keywords, we also see ads for Guerlain, which is not very fair play!
One reason for that is that usually SEM campaigns of big brands are managed by Chinese companies, who don’t act like luxury brands should act.
With this kind of methods, Baidu forces brands to buy Baidu Brandzone (very expensive), and to pay SEM campaigns on their name, in order to stop the competitors from buying their keywords. This makes the prices get higher, and generates revenue for Baidu.
Baidu was by the way punished by the government, which published in the press the abuses of Baidu who let rogue marketers advertise.