Maximize your chances of success on Baidu by understanding how to properly set up your website. From domain setup to technical implementation, this post covers everything you need to know.
Setting up your website for success on Baidu can seem daunting, but following the proper steps will give you the best chance of being seen by users in China. From domain setup to technical implementation, this post covers everything you need to know about optimizing for Baidu spiders.
Setting Up Your Domain Name and DNS Records.
Ensuring your domain name is setup and recognized by the Baidu Spider. Your domain name should be properly set up for Unicode characters and to appear as a Chinese “.CN” address. Additionally, any DNS records pointing to your website should also be updated so that Baidu sees them as “Chinese” and can crawl them successfully. Updating your DNS records regularly will ensure that you have minimal downtime on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Optimal Page Load Time and Sitemap Setup.
Another critical aspect in ensuring that your website is properly crawled and indexed by Baidu is the page load speed. If a website takes too long to load, the crawler will not include or index it properly. Therefore, you should strive for high levels of server performance optimization and optimal coding practices to ensure faster load times. Additionally, having a well-structured sitemap can make it easier for the crawler to reach all of your webpages and make them available on the SERPs.
Structuring URLs and Addressing Canonicalization Issues.
In order to ensure that the Baidu spider accurately crawls and index pages, it is important to have organized URLs that are easy for the spider to understand. You should keep your URLS meaningful and make sure they adhere to SEO best practices. Additionally, taking preventive measures like using 301 redirects or canonical tags can help prevent any confusion or problems with duplicate content for Baidu, as well as other search engines.
Choosing the Right Hosting Provider for Optimal Performance.
An important step to set up your website for Baidu spider is choosing the right hosting provider. You will want to select one with a good reputation, a secure networking infrastructure and optimized servers for fast loading speeds. Furthermore, ensure that you also get a strong geographic coverage in areas where your target audience is located as this will help you greatly with achieving better rankings.
Improving Site Crawlability with Robots.txt and Metadata
To make your website crawlable and visible to Baidu, you need to implement both robots.txt files and meta robot tags on your webpages. Robots.txt is a small text file that explains what search engine spiders should (or should not) index with the links and content present on the website. With meta robot tags, you can specify for the spiders if pages are meant to be indexed or not, as well as control actions such as follow/nofollow inbound links from other websites. Together, these measures will ensure that Baidu bots have better understanding of what’s available on your site.