In China, Google enjoys only a 27% market share; very second fiddle to (Baidu) with 55%. Similarly, in Russia, Google ranks third, with (Yandex) the undisputed leader. More than 50% of the growth in Internet users between 2007 and 2010 is likely to come from these huge countries. Isn’t it time to consider listing on your major search engines? This short article looks at what is required to get your site crawled.
The growth of the Internet in China and Russia
Russia is one of the world’s fastest growing economies and the most densely populated country in Europe. Internet penetration in Russia currently stands at just 19.5% (versus 69.9% in the US). In China, penetration is only 10.9% (in a population more than four times the size of the US). Penetration levels in Western Europe and North America appear to have stabilized and are unlikely to grow significantly in the future. Most of the new internet users around the world will come from India and China. Most of the new European users will come from Russia. A wave of change is sweeping the web as we speak, and within 18 months, China will overtake the US as the largest online Internet community.
Is Google near the height of its powers?
He poses an interesting question; Is Google in fact at its zenith? Most commentators put Google’s current underlying market share (in advanced Western economies) at about 75%. However, what will its global market share be in five years? Even if they slightly increase their presence in Russia and China, their overall global share will fall, simply by the law of averages. It would be very unwise, at this point, to discount the growing importance of these new competitors!
Get listed on Yandex
Yandex does not accept submissions from sites hosted outside of Russia. However, this does not mean that domain names have to end in .ru (Russia) or .ua (Ukraine). In fact, any site with an IP address in a Russian-speaking country or with pages in Russian will eventually be indexed by the search engine. Try comparing a search for “Intel” with a search for “Amazon”. You’ll notice that Intel, which has a portion of its site in Russian, does better than Amazon. Take a look at this page from Ice Graphics which, unlike Amazon, achieves (only) one top 10 result for the search phrase “books” on Yandex (despite being an English site, hosted in the US). USA). This is due to the presence of Russian-language text on the page (including text that is not correctly tagged as Russian in HTML or meta-language tags).
So the first rule to learn for Yandex is to have some text in Russian for your Russian clients. In general, it will be better to include any text in Russian with the correct W3C markup. For example, the following Russian phrase (roughly equivalent to “the early bird catches the worm”) would be encoded as follows:
The second rule to learn is that Yandex will index your page faster if it is linked to sites hosted in Russia. For example, Ice Graphics is linked from computerra.ru, ebdb.ru and more. Personally, I recommend clients look for listings in 5-6 quality Russian-based bilingual directories. Visit my blog to see some examples.
Get listed on Baidu
The first point to note is that Baidu, unlike Google, merges its organic results with the paid results from its paid listing service. As such, the fastest way to achieve a top ranking on Baidu is to participate in their paid service. As there is no English Baidu ads interface (yet), the best way to achieve this is to use an agent.
In order to rank well organically, you must first realize that the Chinese search audience is very Sinocentric. Your destination landing page should be entirely in Chinese and presented in Chinese style. This inevitably means using the services of a Chinese translator (and quite possibly a web designer as well). Please note that while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Simplified Chinese will suffice to serve all markets. The entire web page must be encoded using a Simplified Chinese declaration in the page metadata:
You may find some guide on the web suggesting the use of “zh-Hant” which is the correct markup for Simplified Chinese. However, I would stick with zh-CN for now as it supports a wider range of web applications. When you are ready, you can submit your site to Baidu from the following page:
Baidu URL Submit Page: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html
Please note that Baidu does not guarantee that your site will be crawled and your site must adhere to their listing guidelines.
Once listed on Baidu, you can improve your position by getting high-quality inbound links from Chinese directories. Many of the best directories (to target) are those in Taiwan and Hong Kong (where Internet penetration has been highest for the longest). Again, there are some suggestions on my blog. Good luck with the campaign and let me know if you need any help.
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Remember, time and tide wait for no one and the early bird catches the worm, so get down to business with Yandex and Baidu before your competitors!