China Baidu SEO Q&A

Compared to Google Baidu as the largest local search engine, it has some characteristics.

1. Is there a prioritization of URLs within the sitemap? There is a prioritization metric you could ad to a URL within the sitemap to show Google more or less relevant URLs. Does something similar exist for Baidu?

No. There is no similar prioritization in Baidu rules. Within Baidu official documents, there is nothing mentioned about sitemap prioritization, which means there is no prioritization tags of URLs in the sitemap.
As personal experience, I trust Baidu do have no prioritization tags of URL in the sitemap; corresponding with this characteristic, when building China’s website we should take more importance on the surface structure, for instance:

• avoid using JavaScript in the navigation menu: Baidu spider absolutely cannot read JavaScript.
• well-design the navigation menu is a matter of importance: Navigation menu is the most common approach to acquiring internal link, thus impacting the URLs authority dispatch.
• we still suggest you to include the prioritization in your website: the URL prioritization might help you in some uncertain way.

2. How important is the noindex tag for links for Baidu? When do you use it and how does Baidu treat it?

No sure, while I prefer to believe there is no noindex meta tag for Baidu, though there is a lot of unofficial people mentioned and use this. But according to the experience of our team, this cannot 100% make works.

• If you in need of noindex some pages, please write it in robots.txt, which is a sure thing to hold indexing back.

3. How important is the nofollow tag for links for Baidu? When do you use it and how does Baidu treat it?
   About the no follow tag, it works in the same way to Google; it means Baidu treats no-follow tag in the same way to Google, which is “Links marked with no-follow attributes will generally not be followed.” We usually use it:

• Whereas we don’t want to pass PageRank.
  -In China due to there is law requiring all sites homepage should have link to the ICP official site, so here is an unique local application environment.

4. 这种网站怎么优化呀? （JS JavaScript站）

这是一个JS站。可以1）精准定位选取首页关键词，2）并在meta title里面植入目标关键词 3）使用seo外链技术增长首页权重获取首页关键词排名。