China SEO Blog

A new service from Baidu targets large corporations for increased brand awareness. The Brand Advertising Program will provide a prominent listing for advertisers, with multiple links and even graphic ads.

Gome (国美), the largest consumer electronics store and China Construction Bank (中国建设银行), one of the top 4 banks in China, have joined the program and you can expect more large players to get involved as well very soon. Financial conditions for participating into this program have not been revealed.

A search on Baidu for “建行” (”jianhang” the short-name of CCB) provides the picture below.

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InterActiveCorp (IAC)’s CEO Barry Diller has announced that the group flagship search engine, Ask.com, will enter the Chinese market within the next two years. The group plans to invest 100 million dollars in the middle kingdom expansion with the hope to become a major player in the country’s highly competitive search industry.

Ask is ranked fourth in the US (behind Google, Yahoo and Live/MSN). But if Google hasn’t been able to beat rival Baidu, while Yahoo and Microsoft are struggling with tiny yet decreasing market shares, what strategy will enable Ask to make it in China and surpass local players lead by Baidu?

An acquisition strategy seems probable as it would be hard to imagine Ask to start from scratch. Maybe Ask would take a look at Sina’s iask.com, due to name similarities and the fact that iask (爱问 in Chinese) is already well known as a search engine in China (although not one of the top tier or even second tier engines)? iask.com results are currently powered by Google.

A whois search has revealed that ask.cn and ask.com.cn are currently owned by a Beijing company called 北京国网信息有限责任公司. ask.cn is currently parked with sedoparking while ask.com.cn redirect to www.u.cn ; someone is about to get seriously rich….

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We have just launched a new blog for our web hosting division, China Hosting Blog. This blog will be about web hosting in China, with web hosting related news and articles, and of course updates on hosting solutions and services we can provide.

The new blog can be accessed from the following url: blog.sinohosting.net

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Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Google Sitemaps) has seen recently the introduction of “Geograhic Targeting” in the tools it offers to webmasters. Essentially, it allows webmasters to inform Google of which country they target, by selecting this country in their account. Country domain specific TLDs (such as .cn, .ca, .co.uk etc.) will be automatically set to the countries they refer to.

The problem is, in today’s global economy, many companies have a huge portion of their clients (and web visitors) from countries other than the ones they are based in. So, how can a webmaster or a company in China capitalize on this new tool (that has the potential to help improve the ranking in the targeted country) without sacrificing current rankings achieved on the main Google searches and other countries?

One solution would be the use of sub-domains. Here is the example of our web hosting division website www.sinohosting.net ; currently in Google Webmaster Tools the site is not set to any specific geographic target. Nevertheless, we have set the Chinese version of the site, which is on its own sub-domain cn.sinohosting.net and is added as a separate website on Google Webmaster Tools, with its own sitemap and stats etc., to China. That way, the Chinese site would hopefully be able to achieve better rankings for searches in China (in Chinese though) without compromising the overall rankings of the main site for searches conducted in English globally.

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The Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, has just launched a new service called Baidu Finance (百度财经).

Modeled after Google Finance, Baidu Finance offers links and information about China and Hong Kong stocks, mutual funds, bonds, trusts and other financial products. Real-time stock quotes and charts, listed companies news and more are also available. Of course, Baidu has leveraged on its web properties by linking to its user-generated contents, Baidu News and other services as well.

An English version is available, but still very basic and would need huge improvement to even come close to what is provided by Google or Yahoo.

Baidu Finance is still in beta mode. It can be accessed from the following link: stock.baidu.com

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Google has made changes to its Site Targeting feature in Adwords, by allowing advertisers to pay on a Cost-per-Click basis when choosing a site for advertising. Previously, advertisers could only pay per thousand impressions (CPM), the CPC option being available only on keywords-targeted campaigns. The name “Site Targeting” has also be changed to “Placement Targeting”.

Site targeting campaigns have become very frustrating even for advertisers aiming at branding. Although CPM remains available in the new “Placement Targeting” model, it is clear that this model will be much avoided by smart advertisers because of its poor performance and lower cost-efficiency.

To put it simply, Placement Targeting (the CPC model) combines the best of both world: you choose the sites on which your ad appear (avoiding therefore bogus sites or MFA pages), but on the other hand, you only pay for clicks occured.

This can be very interesting for advertisers in China as well. A typical example is advertisers who target the expatriate community in Shanghai and other major Chinese cities. Previously it was very difficult to create large and successful campaigns to market to the foreign community in China through Google Adwords. When using keywords-targeted campaigns, even when turning off Chinese from the campaigns settings, and using only English keywords, a large portion of the ads ended up on poorly-performing Chinese websites, prompting advertisers in most case to turn off the Content Network option, reducing drastically the size of the campaign. When using site targeting though, the smaller number of English or expat-related websites made CPM extremely high and generally not cost-effective at all. Now with the new Placement Targeting system, advertisers will have the option to select the sites they want their ads to appear on, and not be charged for useless pageviews.

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Google China says the new domain will make it easier for Chinese users to remember and use its search engine. This move is probably part of the global search engine giant continuous effort to play a major role in the mobile search industry. Difficult to say at this point whether this will have any impact at all when it comes to help the company’s gain market share from Baidu in overall search.

Will any competitor follow up by using a short domain in China? We won’t be surprised to see a b.cn or similar move in the near future…

G.cn is currently redirecting to Google China homepage, Google.cn

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