First let's see a report from netmarketshare. It shows that in 2014, Google still dominate global search engine with 67.53% market share. And for Baidu, it has 18.38% market share. There is no deny that Google and Baidu has become two leaders in search market and this is also the reason why I compare the SEO between these two search engines.
Normally, a website which has a good rank in google also has a good rank in Baidu. There is always an exception to any rule. Though this topic have ever been discussed for many times, to be honest, none of those results satisfied me even some authors never prove them! As a result, today I'd like to talk about some essential difference that you may never see between google SEO and Baidu SEO.
1. The length of the title
If I ask a question, how long is it appropriate for the Title in Google and Baidu. Maybe you can find more than 5 answers in the internet. Such as someone said Baidu shows the same length with Google. The following picture will tell you that is bullshit!
Baidu will show 64 characters of the whole title and the number of google is 56! You can check any title which is longer than 64 characters in order to verify what I said. In addition, in the end, Baidu has "..." that occupies 3 characters and Google has " ..." that occupies 4 characters. Both Baidu and Google sometimes adjust the length according to what people search for. In my opinion, 60-80 characters is a suitable length.
2. Regional ranking
Baidu focuses on China and Google focuses on global. Normally, if your website both register Google Analytics and Baidu Statistics, you'll find the traffic volume of GA is more than Baidu Statistics. In fact, Baidu supported to count all traffic from the whole world since the second half of 2014. As a result, Baidu gives a little bit different ranking in terms of different provinces. But Google is according to countries. That means if you located your website in Hong Kong, you'll probably have a better ranking in China than in the US.
3. External link standards
It seems that a same website, Google includes more external links than Baidu in their webmaster tools. Actually, Baidu rarely seize the website that use other languages except Chinese. Baidu also gives some fake external links which you can find through the "domain" statement. I'm not totally sure whether they make sense or not. If any, the effect is probably not better than real external links. In general, the more good external links, the better the ranking.
4. Internal link rules
Google webmaster tool has a function called "Content Keywords". It shows the frequency of most of your keywords in your whole website. But Baidu doesn't give such statistics. So we can take an assumption that the keywords frequency of the whole website(not only one page) might impact your ranking.
5. Keywords density
By the end of last year, Baidu include 1 trillion pages and Google include 30 trillion pages. If your heard an algorithm called "tf-idf", you'll know why I mention this one. I'm sorry for that it is hard to search some material to teach how to make use of this. Basically, I'm still doing some tests in terms of keywords density. Many people said that we need to control the keywords density between 2%-8%. In my view that is unreasonable because can they give such verification? Google changes is algorithm more than 500 times a year, why you can make sure what you did is proved effective? For Google, don't over optimize your sites.
But for Baidu, sometimes higher keywords density really makes sense. A good example is when we search for some newest movies, you usually find some irrelevant results which including the word you search for many times. That is the evident which shows Baidu cannot distinguish the meaning of sentences.
Baidu also gives a high ranking for its own products such as Baidu Library, Q&A and its pedia. To be honest, Baidu is a plagiarist. Not only for its products, but also its search engine. So don't care too much about these differences and focus on what exactly can meet users need, and you'll get an ideal outcome.
