How to Submit Your Site to Baidu?

What is Baidu?

Baidu is a search engine used in China having more than 75% of the market share. It is also widely used search engine among the Chinese or Mandarin speaking community in most part of the world including Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Why Should You Submit Your Site to Baidu?

Chinese are one of the highest internet users in the world and approximately one million English searches are carried out in China per day. Baidu has more than 75% of the search engine market share in China while Google has over 15%. Moreover Microsoft is having a tie up with Baidu for the English search results, that means the English search results in Baidu will use Bing search engine and then the results will be displayed in Baidu’s Search result pages.

Search Engine Market Share in China

Even your site is not in Chinese language, We highly recommend submitting your site to Baidu. Your traffic will increase multifold if you can index your site in Baidu search engine.

How to Submit Your Site to Baidu?

Baidu offers site submission only in Chinese through Baidu Webmaster Tools account. A site needs to be submitted only once with the home page URL, Baidu search engine automatically includes all other pages of your site.

• Click here to register for a Baidu webmaster tools account and fill the details as shown below.

Baidu Webmaster Tools Registration

• You will see different type of success messages based on the email you used for registration. For example, using Microsoft email accounts like Hotmail will show an integrated button to login to your Microsoft live account to check email instantly.

Baidu Registration Message for Yahoo! or Gmail ID

Registration Message for Microsoft Email Clients

• A verification email in Chinese will be sent to your email id and activate your account by clicking on the confirmation link in that email.

Baidu Webmaster Tools Activation Email Link

Verification link is valid for 48 hours from the time of registration, if not activated within this time you may need to register again.

• Nowadays Baidu made SMS verification or Chinese CAPTCHA verification almost mandatory for international registrations. Clicking on the verification email will take you to either SMS verification page or Chinese CAPTCHA verification page.
• Using Microsoft email accounts like Hotmail or Outlook will generally take you to the verification page where you need to enter CAPTCHA code in simplified Chinese. You can use trackpad handwriting if simplified Chinese language pack is enabled on your computer or use handwriting option in Google translate for writing Chinese CAPTCHA code and then copy paste it in the text box.

Baidu Simplified Chinese CAPTCHA Verification

• Using Gmail or Yahoo! for registration will generally take you to SMS verification page. Choose the country code from the drop-down, enter your phone number and click on the “Get Verification Code” button to receive a SMS. Enter the received code in the box below and click “Submit” button to complete the registration.

Baidu Webmaster Tools SMS Verification

Baidu does  not list down all country codes in the drop-down (refer comments). In this case you can try by changing your registration email id after clearing browser’s cache.

• Using local Chinese email accounts like QQ, Weibo or 163.com sometimes not require this additional verification. Weibo also has an integrated account to login to Baidu services.
• Once you successfully registered, click here to login to Baidu webmaster tools account. Enter user id (email id or phone number) and password to login to your account.

Baidu Webmaster Tools Login

• Navigate to the first option “Site Management” and click on the “Add New Site” button as shown below.

Add Your Site in Baidu Webmaster Tools Account

• Enter your site URL and click on “Add a Site” to submit your site to Baidu.

Submit Site in Baidu Webmaster Tools

• You will get a popup with various verification methods.You need to verify your site ownership in order to use other features of Baidu webmaster tools. Learn more here about adding and verifying your site in detail.

Content guidelines for Baidu site submission

• No sexual and offensive content

Make sure you do not have any pornography and politically controversial content in your site. China has a great internet censorship and if your site has any illegal content there is no possibility of indexed by Baidu.

• At least have a single page of your site in Chinese

It is recommended to have a complete Chinese site for Baidu, if not possible make sure at least one page in your site is in Chinese. Add the below meta tag in your Chinese page to inform the crawler that your page is in Chinese.

1	<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Language" CONTENT="ZH">

If you are planning to translate your site then ensure all the keywords are translated into your new site. Unlike Google, Baidu will not index the new English site, hence submitting your new English site may not bring any results.

• Create your site with a Chinese domain and host it from China

Baidu prefers to index the sites hosted in China. You can easily find a Chinese hosting service having servers in China. Your domain name will end with .cn or .com.cn.