The main benefit of having a website hosted in China is much faster loading time compared to the same site hosted out of the country. There is no question that faster loading speed can benefit your website from both user experience and SEO standpoints. What’s more, there is practically no chance that your site may get blocked in China for simply being unlucky enough to share a server with a blacklisted site (it does happen).

Unfortunately, due to the fact that internet in China is tightly controlled by the government, hosting a website in China requires obtaining a permit called ICP license that stands for Internet Content Provider or bei’an (备案) in Chinese. This license is issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to permit China-based websites to operate in China. The ICP licence numbers for Chinese websites can often be found on the bottom of the front webpage:

The ICP license can only be issued to Chinese registered companies. A few years ago there was a pilot program in Shanghai that allowed foreign companies to apply for ICP but it seems to be discontinued now. This means that if your business is only registered overseas, you won’t be eligible for ICP license and can’t get a local hosting.

Once your company registers a business entity in China, getting ICP license still can be quite a hassle but, fortunately, most local hosting providers will take care of that for you. There is also a grace period for new companies to obtain the ICP license after they have purchased a hosting package. However, once that period expires, a site without a valid ICP license will be taken down by the hosting company.

What if you do not plan registering in business in China? Can you still have a reasonably fast website for the mainland visitors? The answer is yes. There are some intermediate hosting solutions that involve servers in Hong Kong or Macau. China’s largest hosting provider Aliyun offers such solutions to international clients so do some of the native Hong Kong providers.

There are also CDN (content delivery networks) providers that can accelerate your site specifically for Chinese visitors. The most well known one, CloudFlare, has special server options for sites trying to reach Chinese audience.

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The post Hosting Website in China: ICP License and Why You May Need It appeared first on Sampi.co.

Here are the top 10 items on your China web presence check list:

#1: Subdomains or multiple domains

Baidu generally dislikes subdomains – something that is very common with multilingual websites. For example, you should avoid setting up en.mysite.com for English and zh. mysite.com for Chinese. Baidu prefers to have different languages on completely separate domains. For example, if www.mysite.com is your main site, www.mysite.cn could be its Chinese language equivalent. This makes it harder to maintain, however, if you want to rank high on Baidu – do not use subdomains.

#2: Using robot.txt file

Another Baidu quirk is disfavoring robot.txt file – Google’s standard way to communicate with search engine crawlers. This is the most common way to tell search engines which pages should not be crawled. For the purpose of your China web presence, those specific instructions should be set in .htaccess file or in server settings. This is another reason to use separate domain for your Chinese site (see #1).

#3: Domain names

Baidu ranks .CN domains higher than the equivalent .COM and.NET. As .CN domain registration is open to foreigners now, there is no excuse not to grab it. Also, once you have established you China web presence and your brand becomes well-known, chances are that .CN domain may become the target of internet squatters. So, if it is still available, register it now.

#4: Loading time optimization

Long loading time will not only ruin user experience of your Chinese visitors but also lower your Baidu ranking. The best solution is to host in China, however that requires ICP license issued by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and is only available to China registered businesses. Hosting in Hong Kong may improve the loading speed but it still won’t be as fast as hosting in China. Signing up with a reliable CDN provider (content delivery network) service, such as CloudFlare, could be another alternative solution.

#5: Broken links to blocked sites

Links to blocked social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube will appear broken which will slow down the loading as well (see #4). Also, services like Google fonts wouldn’t load causing your fonts look not as intended. Google map wouldn’t work either and YouTube hosted video wouldn’t play. The only solution is to use the local equivalents for blocked services such as Weibo, YouKu and Baidu.

#6: Blacklisted keywords

If your site uses any of the blacklisted keywords, it will be deindexed by Baidu and probably blocked from access too. Wikipedia keeps updated list of blacklisted keywords that are mostly related to politics but keep in mind that the list may change quickly triggered by specific current events. In any case, staying away from politics in China is probably a good idea anyway.

#7:  Keyword research

It is important to do a proper keyword research with the tools available from Baidu rather than Google. Also, the keywords should never be a straight forward translation from English – Google translate or similar tools are absolutely inadequate for this purpose. This is why it is important to enlist help of a professional translator or, at least, run it by a native Chinese speaker.

#8: Using iFrames, JavaScript and Flash

Similar to Google, Baidu can’t crawl iFrames and Flash content. Although Google is getting much better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is still pretty much blind to it. This means that any of your SEO content should not be in JavaScript which also includes navigation drop down menu. This is why it is a good idea to have a duplicate footer menu that is not JS based. As for iFrames and Flash – they belong to history anyway.

#9: Link building

At the moment, Baidu still values link quantity over quantity, which means that techniques and tricks that used to work with Google 2-3 years ago can still be quite effective for your China web presence purpose. It is quite likely that, eventually, Baidu will follow Google’s approach of putting more emphasis on link quality vs. quantity, after all they used to follow Google’s every step. In any case, for now, back links from anyone and everything would still bring SEO benefits to your site.

#10: Baidu site submission

Don’t count on Baidu finding your site quickly – it’s better to submit it manually. Since, Baidu doesn’t have an equivalent to Google webmaster tools, the website has to be re-submitted every time there is a major change. Here is the link to Baidu submission tool.

The post Checklist for Building your China Web Presence first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Checklist for Building your China Web Presence appeared first on Sampi.co.

Ideally, if your site is hosted in China, the loading time wouldn’t be an issue for a properly designed website. Unfortunately, hosting on Chinese servers requires obtaining ICP license first, which is only available to local companies. In one of the earlier posts, we have already discussed pros and cons or hosting website in China. 

If you are a foreign based company than you should carefully consider whether your current hosting is the adequate solution for reaching Chinese audience.

How can you test your Chinese website loading time and accessibility without being physically present in the country?

There are many free tools to test website performance in different countries. It comes as no surprise that none of them offers accurate results for China. This is primarily due to heavily regulated nature of Chinese internet and its infamous Great Firewall.

The only tool that works reasonably well, and which we use all the time, is the one by 360 Search company called YiYun. It is completely free and, although, the interface is in Chinese, it is quite easy to use. Here is how it works:

Step 1: go to http://ce.cloud.360.cn/:

Step 2: paste or type in your website in the prompt, then click the green button:

Step 3: give it some time to get data from all the nodes on the network. Once ready, you will see something like this:

The map is self-explanatory: the “greener” it is – the faster is your Chinese website loading time. Grey areas mean that no data is available in those provinces and red is obviously “bad”. For example, testing it with google.com predictably shows that the site is inaccessible everywhere except Taiwan, Hong Kong and, surprisingly, Heilongjiang – the most Northeastern province bordering Russian Far East (must have been a temporary glitch in the Great Firewall):

The table on the right of the map shows top three provinces sorted by faster loading speed:

Each province can be looked in for more details. For example, clicking on Guangdong shows more data for that province:

Below the map, there is more data presented in a table format. Each province shows local ISP (there are only handful government owned ISPs in China), IP address, loading time, connection time, download time etc.

For technically inclined, there is some more data for each locale:

Ping option shows the website’s ping response:

Trace button returns more detailed traffic info:

Finally, there is more info with “dig” option:

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The post How To Test Chinese Website Loading Time And Accessibility appeared first on Sampi.co.

Unfortunately, many websites that are hosted abroad still have a dismal loading time. This, undoubtedly, is adversely impacting their business in the Mainland. In addition, there is always a risk of getting banned and losing Chinese traffic completely if a website has been unlucky enough to share a server with a site that has been blacklisted by Chinese authorities for whatever reason.

On the other hand, hosting website in China is not as easy as it would have been in case of most countries.

What are the Challenges of Hosting Website in China?

First of all, every website that is physically hosted in China must obtain ICP (Internet Content Provider) license from Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

ICP licenses are issued on provincial level and, currently, only Chinese registered businesses are eligible to obtain them. In the past, there was a pilot program in Shanghai that allowed issuing ICP license to some foreign enterprises but, so far, we haven’t heard of anyone getting one.

This policy is unlikely to change in near future as Chinese government seems to be tightening its control over internet rather than loosening it.

On the other hand, registering WOFE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise) type of company in China is becoming much easier and significantly cheaper than it was in the past. Some jurisdictions, such as Shenzhen or Shanghai, have streamlined their process in recent years, significantly simplifying business registration in China.

As an alternative to web hosting in China, doing it in Hong Kong could be considered as a half way solution. The loading speed will most likely improve, although it will still fall short of what it would have been in case of physically hosting website in China.

If you would like to test your website’s performance in China, you could use the tools that we discussed in our post on how to test website loading speed.

The next challenge is related to communication with the hosting company and the tech support. Unfortunately, very few Mainland based web hosting providers offer English control panel or any support in English. Those that do, charge premium for that. So, picking a good Chinese web hosting provider with all the required qualifications could be tricky. Many web hosting companies just don’t see selling hosting plan to individual sites as a particularly profitable business and prefer to focus on large enterprise solutions instead. As a result, there is a major lack of options to host a regular site with the provider that also offers English tech support.

Finally, hosting website in China may still not work as smooth as one would expect. The main reason behind it is the problematic infrastructure of Chinese internet in general that often creates major traffic bottlenecks. The root of the problem is the fact that China’s core internet access is largely controlled by just two ISPs: China Telecom and China Unicom.

Here is the technical explanation from the recent blog by Cloudflare, one of the largest CDN (content delivery network) providers:

“…China Telecom operates many distinct networks across several provinces, many of which operate independently of one another. The interconnection points between these networks, and the ISPs themselves, are also candidates for congestion, with too much traffic paired with too little capacity. The connectivity between different ISPs in different provinces can become so fraught that it is sometimes more efficient to route traffic outside the country, across a third party network, and then back in.”

In fact, in the same article, Cloudflare has announced its partnership with Baidu that will allow them to setup 17 data centers in Mainland China. This can, potentially, become another alternative for physical web hosting in China. Cloudflare even claims to be able to automatically process ICP license applications on behalf of their clients.

The post Challenges of Hosting Website in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Challenges of Hosting Website in China appeared first on Sampi.co.