Roughly seventy percent of technical search work transfers between Google and Baidu. The remaining thirty percent is where sites entering the Chinese market either win or waste the budget, and it is worth naming precisely.
What transfers unchanged
Crawlability, a flat linked structure, unique descriptive URLs, correct status codes, sitemaps, fast servers, readable text rather than content locked in images or script, one page per subject, and the general principle that pages should answer the question they claim to.
What is different in kind
- Published specifications with numbers. Baidu states that first-screen content should load within a second, that main content must occupy over half the first screen, that body text should be at least 10pt with a line-height ratio above 1.4. Google publishes principles; Baidu publishes measurements and enforces them by named algorithm.
- Permission walls are a violation. Forcing registration, login or an app install to read content or use a function is prohibited — except for genuinely copyrighted material. The standard Western growth playbook breaks this rule directly.
- Floating and pop-up advertising is prohibited outright, in any position, at any size.
- Submission is active and quota-limited. Ordinary and fast collection have daily allowances; API push exists because being indexed first matters commercially.
- Domain focus is a ranking factor. Publishing outside your field reduces it — the opposite of the “more content is more surface” instinct.
- Subdomains inherit only part of the main site’s weight, and Baidu recommends directories until a section can stand alone.
- Named algorithms with published penalties. Hurricane’s terms — three months to lift a first offence, no release for a second — have no Google equivalent.
What is different in practice
The platform, its documentation and its feedback channel are in Chinese. Hosting inside mainland China requires an ICP licence, and sites without one load slowly enough for the one-second standard to be unreachable. Mobile is the product, not a segment.
The strategic reading
Treat Baidu as a second discipline with its own specifications, not as Google with a different logo. The specifications are published, which makes the work unusually concrete — and unusually easy to fail while believing the site is well optimised.
How we apply this
The two facts that reset client expectations fastest are that permission walls and floating ads are prohibited rather than merely discouraged, and that hosting outside mainland China without an ICP licence makes the one-second first-screen standard effectively unreachable. Both are infrastructure and legal decisions rather than SEO tasks, and both have to be settled before any content work is worth commissioning.
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