The dangers of ‘Googlizing’ your site
By optimizing your website for Google, you possibly can be sabotaging your website for Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia and Eastern Europe.
It is an indisputable fact that Google has the most important search market footprint on the earth. As a outcome, there’s an countless provide of assets and details about how you can optimize seek for Google. As such, I perceive how necessary it’s for website house owners to ensure that their websites are optimized and carry out nicely in Google search outcomes.
However, by optimizing a website solely based mostly on Google’s algorithm modifications and skills, you may very well be de-optimizing a website for different search engines. This de-optimization might devastate your website’s efficiency in some important markets.
If a market like China is essential to your small business, it is advisable to be sure that the modifications you make to enhance Google efficiency additionally work properly for a search engine like Baidu.
For Russia and a few japanese European nations, it must work for Yandex.
There are many variations in search engine optimization greatest practices amongst search engines together with native laws, area, and internet hosting location. Below are a number of the updates that you might have carried out or are planning to implement to your website which will ravage your natural search visitors from Baidu.
JavaScript and AJAX
Last yr, Google confirmed it might crawl and index hyperlinks and content material inside JavaScript and AJAX. This was in fact nice information to many website house owners as it might assist enhance their website experiences.
Unfortunately, Baidu is just not good at crawling and indexing content material inside JavaScript and AJAX, but. Using JavaScript for website navigation kills visitors from Baidu instantly after a brand new website launch. In one instance, we noticed how shortly after a brand new website launch, the variety of Chinese pages listed by Baidu decreased from 86,300 pages to 174 pages.
In November final yr, Yandex introduced it will begin to crawl JavaScript and AJAX, and warned website house owners to not block their JavaScript and CSS information. However, simply because Yandex can now crawl and index these hyperlinks and content material, doesn’t imply pages will begin to present up greater in search outcomes. Yandex measures the worth of the pages based mostly on not solely the content material, but in addition the incoming hyperlinks and different statistical knowledge.
Recommendation:
Where potential, don’t use JavaScript and AJAX for navigation and content material that have to be crawled and listed by Baidu. If you continue to want to use JavaScript and AJAX, create a separate Chinese website with static hyperlinks within the navigation, and necessary content material in HTML.
Yandex has created particular mechanisms to provide higher visibility within the search outcomes for pages with JavaScript and AJAX.
Meta key phrases, meta description and header tags
Content entered within the meta key phrases, meta description and header tags won’t be thought-about as necessary because it was for Google, however it nonetheless performs an necessary position in search engine marketing for Baidu.
Recommendation:
Therefore, place meta key phrases and meta description tags within the <Head> part on all pages. You can depart them clean for different nation/language websites, however make sure to fill them out on Chinese pages. Also use <H1> ~ <H6> tags on pages. They might not assist as a lot towards Google, however additionally they gained’t harm. It’s greatest to make use of them in your webpage templates to assist your Chinese pages.
Subdomain vs. sub-listing
While most efficiency exams present that segmenting the nation or language utilizing a subdirectory performs higher for a website and not using a nation code prime-degree area, some worldwide search engine optimization specialists nonetheless advocate using subdomains.
Google’s Webmaster Help Guide permits companies to make use of both technique. However, Baidu particularly suggests utilizing subdirectories.
Recommendation:
If you would like your Chinese website to carry out properly in Baidu’s search outcomes, you might want to set your Chinese website as a sub-listing reminiscent of, “Yourdomain.com/cn/,” or “Yourdomain.com/zh-cn/and never as a subdomain resembling, “cn.yourdomain.com.”
Content placement inside the net web page
Google and most main search engines have turn into actually good at crawling and indexing whole pages of content material.
However, Baidu is inferior to doing the job, but. It can also be recognized that when Baidu re-crawls pages which were listed earlier than, it solely crawls the primary one thousand bytes or so of the content material to see if it has new info. If it doesn’t discover something new, it stops indexing the remainder of the web page, and strikes on to the subsequent one.
Recommendation:
Always place essential content material (together with key phrases) at the start of the web page. If you replace any content material within the backside half of the web page, submit the URLs of these pages to Baidu utilizing Baidu’s Webmaster Tool for re-indexing.
Yandex additionally has its personal Webmaster Tools, the place you possibly can assessment your site efficiency, submit XML sitemaps, and take different actions to enhance your web site.
There are many different algorithmic variations between the Google, Baidu and Yandex search engines like google and yahoo. If China and Eastern Europe are essential markets for your enterprise, just remember to take balanced web optimization methods that work for your whole goal serps.
