For those of us involved in business in China, news is out that Baidu, the Chinese search giant with 80% traffic share have partnered with Bing to provide the results for English language searches.
“Baidu has about 80 percent of the search market in China — a nation with almost half a billion Internet users and still only about 30 percent penetration — after Google left mainland China in a high-profile fallout with Beijing over censorship.” Jason Subler and Georgina Prodhan / HUFF POST TECH
Up until now most brands with an interest in SEO in China have been able to rely on the presence of Google.co.hk to provide English results. However, with a big name alternative like Bing attached to Baidu and the obvious dislike of Google by the government that could well be set to change.
Most of my efforts in China have been focused on providing good, Chinese language websites. The common mistake people seem to make is to forget about pages addresses and meta data and end up with sites that look Chinese to the user but English to the search engines. To be honest, displaying page addresses in Chinese was a major CMS victory for the development team and is something none of our direct competitors have managed to pull off yet. That said, it is just the beginning of a long journey.
Rightly or wrongly I have largely ignored Bing until now, but I guess this is the excuse I have been waiting for. On a positive note that means with the work on Yahoo for Japan, Bing for China, and the Google preference around the rest of the world I will at least have a broad knowledge base on all the key search engines.
Being the guy responsible for the digital marketing strategy I will be looking to leverage whatever competitive advantage I can from this knowledge. Next stop, social media.
Also Read:
For Digital Marketers, strategists, engagement supremo’s and anyone else vaguely interested: here’s a post on web 2.0 in China with an overview of the key Chinese social media channels.