Page 10 - AeM_August_2017

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Being found (or getting lost) in China

To increase the popularity of their Internet content in Beneficial might be, however, knowing the following
China, companies must be ranked as high as possible in facts:
the Baidu or Sogou search ranking, the country’s top
search engines.  Ensure crawl rate: The loading times have a direct
impact on the so-called crawl rate of a website. But
Baidu’s competitor ‘Sogou’ should be currently watched since the Internet is a universe on its own, only a
in particular, since the company recently announced that temporary site indexing or ranking is allowed.
it will focus on artificial intelligence (AI) to build a next- Some content sometimes even falls completely
generation search engine and plans to go public in the through the grid. But for a search engine, to collect
U.S. relevant information, a site must load fast and be
always available.
Sogou literally means "search-dog" and the browser is
China's second-largest mobile search engine. It adopts  Display main content at a glance: Due to the re-
"dual-core" techniques from Google Chrome’s WebKit stricted scans of the crawlers, which means usually
and Internet Explorer's Trident layout engines, and con- only the first 100 KB of a website, the placement of
nects to the cloud to recognize malicious websites and the content is of great importance, meaning the
software. most important information and keywords should
be positioned at the top of the website. The search
Controlled by Sohu.com and 45%-owned by Tencent with Google is designed in such a way that the
Holdings, Sogou has been launched around 13 years search engine exactly "knows" what’s important
ago. Content-sharing with Tencent's social media app information and therefore lists it on top. In Baidu,
WeChat contributed clearly to Sogou's search traffic on the other hand, the positioning can determine
growth, which jumped 50% in mobile in the past few whether the data is indexed at all. In addition, Chi-
months. nese websites are generally much more textual
than Western ones, therefore users are more likely
According to Sogou’s CEO, Wang Xiaochuan, the com- to scroll on long sites rather than clicking through
pany plans to leverage its strength in natural language different layers. Probably that’s also due to the
processing and will move from search to question- slower loading times with which even the local sites
answering by increasing investment into AI, big data and are struggling.
IoT.

Companies in China are nevertheless still struggling with  Check bounce rates: Not only search engine
specific performance challenges and not even a website crawlers with their time-limited scans can have a
hosting in China is enough for an effective SEO ranking. negative impact on the SEO, but also the visitors of
a website. In case of a high bounce rate, Baidu
10 August 2017 - Search Engine Marketing & Optimization