Loading speed is one of the most important metrics of a website performance and is directly linked to bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site) and search engine ranking. Typically, if takes more than 5 seconds to load a page, a visitor would be most likely to move on. Loading time within 2 seconds is considered to be the optimal.

Not surprisingly, website loading speed in China is also a major factor in website ranking with search engines like Google or, in China’s case Baidu.

Unfortunately, even if your website is loading fast in your main market such as US or Europe, it is almost certain that it will be slower in China. There are two main reasons for it: website that are physically hosted outside of China have to pass the “Great Chinese Firewall” – a set of censorship methods setup by Chinese authorities and designed to restrict internet access to websites hosted on foreign servers. The process slows down data transfers and, ultimately, affects the loading speed of foreign based websites.

How to Test Website Loading Speed in China

I’ve personally tried several of the tools that are often recommended but found the results highly unstable or plain unreliable. First the tools that are, in my opinion, don’t do a very good job. Then, at the end, there is the one that I recommend.

WebPageTest.org

This is quite popular but clearly outdated tool which is obvious from the old-fashioned design. One plus, however, is that it allows selection of different browsers to test: Chrome, Firefox, IE etc. Unfortunately, for China there is just one choice – Shanghai. This can be completely inadequate as the loading speeds across China vary quite a bit.

Last time I tried, it got stuck on me and this was all I got:

Conclusion: not recommended

Gomez Networks

This is a very basic tool, although with slightly more choices for the cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Xian. Not a particularly exciting interface and doesn’t test HTTPS (only HTTP):

Conclusion: still too limited

Dotcom-Monitor.com

This tool has a much better designed interface and it allows selecting multiple locations and test them simultaneously. However, the results I got while testing Baidu.com loading in China didn’t make any sense – 4.5 sec to load the number one China’s website in Shanghai? I don’t think so.

Conclusion: unreliable

Site 24×7

This modern looking tool allows testing with several cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Qingdao. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow to run simultaneous tests but one by one. However, when testing website loading speed in China, the results were much more believable: Baidu’s loading time in Shanghai was 0.6 sec. Also, the tools shows some useful breakdown of loading time for different site elements:

Conclusion: acceptable but not the best

CE Cloud 360 by Qihoo

This is the tool that is local to China. It is free to use and run by Qihoo-Haosou, one of the most popular Chinese search engines. The only drawback of this one is that it is entirely in Chinese, otherwise it’s perfect.

CE Cloud not only tests the site from every province and major Chinese city but gives a color coded map of China. Hovering over a map shows a more detailed info for each location and there is a report shown at the table below with even more data.

This is by far the best tool out there for testing website loading speed in China.  Its straight forward interface ensures that even someone with zero Chinese skills can use it just fine.

Conclusion: the best

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First of all,  Baidu.com is by far the most poular search engine in China with somewhere between 60 to 80% of the search engine market. With Google at only around 3% and Yahoo with Bing at ~0.5% each of the entire market, Baidu is clearly a place to be for a business seeking to reach Chinese audience.

One crucial prerequisite is required to start PPC campaign on Baidu is having your site written in Simplified Chinese. It also has to be optimized for the Chinese keywords that you are going to use for your campaign.

Second prerequisite is having your Chinese business properly registered as you will have to provide your business license in order to open Baidu PPC account. If the name on a business license is that of a foreigner, he/she will also be required to provide a passport. All the documents, including your passport, have to be translated to Chinese by a professional translation company. You will also be required to sign and seal the contract with Baidu.

Chinese websites tend to be very link-heavy, so, ideally,  navigation buttons and links should be able to take your visitor to every corner of your site directly from the landing page.

If it wasn’t enough, the deposit payment has to be arranged through a local Baidu representative by cash. As of now, they don’t accept credit cards and any form of online payments. Why they make it so complex? Probably, such procedure is required in order to comply with the government regulations that are designed to impose a certain degree of control over information available through search engines in China.

Given the complexity of opening an account, I would advise to hire a local expert to get you set up. There are number of companies and freelancers who provide this type of service.

Next, your website must be optimized for your target visitors and be informative enough for them to stay on your page long enough. Chinese websites tend to be very link-heavy, so, ideally,  navigation buttons and links should be able to take your visitor to every corner of your site directly from the landing page.

If you intend to sell products directly from your site, it helps to have a live chat option that is common on Chinese e-commerce site. Chinese consumers like to communicate in real time with sales representatives, so having such capability on your site is a good investment.

Now a bit about how your name will be shown in the results. In the past, all the paid search results were displayed first before the organic ones. In the recent years, Baidu started to follow Google’s model with PPC results on the top and on the bottom as well as in the right column with organic ones in between.

Below is the example of Baidu search results. The PPC results are those in the red frames, at the top, bottom and right. Organic (or free) results are shown in the green frame:

The results in the right column are based on the annual subscription at fixed price, the top 3 spot being the most expensive, followed by the next 3 spots and so on. The search  results in each of the 3 spot slot are shown in different order every time the results are reloaded.

In conclusion, while Baidu PPC campaign is similar to Google, the process of opening an account and setting it up is much more complicated. This is besides the fact that you need a local business registration and having your site available in Chinese and optimized to Chinese language keywords. I would strongly advise to hire a local help to get your Baidu PPT campaign setup properly and going smothly.

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SEO for Baidu is not just a one time job but, just as in the case of Google, is a continuous effort. Algorithms and weights of various factors change all the time and, in a way, Baidu seems to be following Google’s logic, although with a considerable delay.

Of course, since Baidu targets Chinese audience, it has its own way of doing things in order to stay more relevant both geographically and linguistically. Since Baidu accounts to up to 70% of Chinese search engine market it’s important to understand how it assigns ranking, what factors are considered important and what could be harmful.

The factors below are listed in the descending order of importance to ranking (based on BaiduGuide.com research):

Broad Algorithms Factors

1. Trust and the Authority of the domain;
2. Link Popularity of the domain;
3. On-page keyword usage;
4. Anchor text or external links to the page;
5. Traffic data;
6. Site age and registration data;
7. Social metrics;

On-Page Ranking Factors (Keyword)

1. Keyword use in the title tag;
2. Keyword use in internal link anchor text;
3. Keyword use in external link anchor text;
4. Keyword use in H1 tag;
5. Keyword use in the page URL (pinyin);
6. Keyword use in image alt tag;
7. Keyword use in domain name (pinyin);
8. Keyword use in H2 – H6 tags;
9. Keyword use in meta description tag;
10. Keyword use in image name (pinyin);

On-Page Ranking Factors (General)

1.  Unique content;
2. Domain name age;
3. Sitemaps (XML, video, image);
4. Number of indexed pages;
5. ICP license registration;
6. Site architecture (should be as flat as possible);
7.  Freshness and ratio of the new pages;
8. Ratio of code to text in HTML;
9. Citations of the domain in Baidu Baike;
10. Spelling and grammar mistakes;

Link Popularity Ranking Factors

1. Topical relevance of the external links;
2. Quality of external links;
3. Keyword focused anchor text from external links;
4. Keyword focused anchor text from internal links;
5. Diversity of link sources;
6. Age of external links;
7. Links from trusted domains;
8. Quantity of external links;
9. Keyword focuses internal links;
10. Links for restricted TLDs;

Social Metrics

1. Baidu like data;
2. Baidu share data;
3. Weibo like or share data;
4. Renren.com like or share data;

Geo-Targeting Factors

1. Country code TLDs (.cn ranks higher then .com etc.);
2. Links from targeted country domains (Preference to Mainland China);
3. Geo location and IP address of the domain (preference to Mainland China);

Negative Ranking Factors

1. Frequent server downtime;
2. Malicious hidden texts;
3. Links to low quality sites;
4. Duplicated content;
5. Links from low quality and spam sites;
6. Keyword stuffing;
7. Purchased links;
8. Server response time;
9. Low traffic to the site;

The post SEO in China, Part 2: Baidu Optimization first appeared on Sampi.co.

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Interesting numbers that I find quite illuminating: Google accounts for barely over 3% of all the searches in China with Yahoo and Bing hovering  just around half percent.

Notice the stats on the mobile searches growing at 94% rate compared to 20% rate decline in desktop based searches.

Scroll down the map to see more interesting data.

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In this post, I’ve pulled in some resources on how to improve your ranking and what factors affect your site’s placements in the search results.

Submitting your site to Baidu

Submitting your site to Baidu is an important thing to do if your site doesn’t appear in the Baidu’s search engine, i.e., it is not indexed yet. Without submitting your site, the Baidu spiders (computer bots that scour the internet) may not find you and your site will not get indexed.

You can submit your site to Baidu’s open source platform at: http://open.baidu.com

Submitting a sitemap

Like Google, submitting a sitemap to Baidu helps them to find all of the pages on your site.
Their platform for sitemap submission is found at:
http://sitemap.baidu.com

Language

Simplified Chinese is the only language that Baidu will recognize. In order to be properly indexed, your website should be written in it. See my other post on translating your website.

Keywords

Keywords are important in Google, but they are still carry more weight in Baidu. While Google is slowly moving away from its dependence on keywords and anchor text, Baidu still considers these very important.

There is a banned list of keywords that mainly have to do with politics, military, controversial events in Chinese history and even gambling. Never use any of the words on it if you don’t want to run the risk of getting your website banned as well.

Flat Architecture

Due to frequent connectivity problems, Baidu’s crawlers won’t index pages that are too deep in your hierarchy. Keep your website’s architecture flat and accessible.

Quantity over Quality

Google’s frequent updates have ensured that SEO specialists understand the importance of the quality of links over the number of links pointing to their websites. Baidu hasn’t reached that level of sophistication yet – quantity is still more important. Obviously, that means that there are many opportunities for link spamming.

However, over the last year, Baidu has been updating its algorithms to punish lower quality sites.

Anchor Text

Anchor text should of course be in Chinese. They should also match the keywords being used on your website. Baidu is quite strict about this and may penalize sites where the anchor text and keywords are not in sync.

Meta Data

Baidu still relies heavily on meta tags to determine relevance so ensure that your meta tags are optimized. This also includes meta keywords tag since Baidu uses them to some extent still.

Local Domain & Hosting

In comparison to Google, Baidu attaches a not insignificant bonus to .com.cn / .cn domains and websites hosted within the Great Firewall.

China’s .cn domains are administered by the Ministry of Information. This means that unlike buying a typical .com domain, .cn registrations will be manually (as in, by a human) reviewed. There are also licenses you will have to apply for. If you have ever dealt with the government, you know this can take time.

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