Baidu is still dominating China’s search market. Some of the newer search engines such as 360 search, Sogou, and Shenma (mobile) are growing, but Baidu maintains the top search engine spot in China with more than 75% share. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses, who are targeting Chinese market to be found in Baidu’s search results. Baidu’s search engine algorithm has evolved and become much similar to Google’s algorithm, but Baidu optimization throws more challenges than the language differences. It is a well known fact that Baidu has been injecting their own content into the organic search results. In recent months, the amount of Baidu content show up in the search results has grown so much so that it’s taking over the top 10 for some of the search queries.

For example, the search results for “???” looks like below.

The first listing is an ad. 5 out of the top 7 search results are Baidu’s own content. It’s still possible to rank in top 10, even in top 3 results organically, but it would take deep site wide and page level optimization to achieve that visibility. This trend is seen more with broader terms, and it is different from one industry to another.