The bottom two grades in Baidu’s quality framework — “poor” and “no quality at all” — describe specific, recognisable pages. Knowing which is which matters, because one is an editorial problem and the other is a violation.
Poor: valid once, worthless now
Baidu’s examples are all about expiry: delisted products, ended group purchases, expired job and transaction pages, deleted videos, downloads that no longer work. None of these were ever deceptive — they simply stopped being true.
The warning attached is the important part: where such pages make up too large a share of a site, the rating of the whole site is affected. Baidu names the site types that must manage this — UGC platforms, e-commerce, directories — which is to say every site whose inventory turns over.
No quality: cheap, scraped, or deceptive
- Content empty or too short to support what the page claims to be about.
- Q&A pages with a question and no answer, or an answer that resolves nothing.
- Internal search result pages carrying no relevant information — a whole category of automatically generated pages that most sites let the crawler reach.
- Content scraped from elsewhere and published without even minimal editing.
- Malware, cheating, or deception.
Baidu’s definition of cheating
“A page that does not aim to satisfy a user need, but profits by deceiving users and the search engine through improper means.” Intent is part of the definition, and Baidu notes such pages have negative value — worse than nothing — which is why the response is removal rather than demotion.
What to do about each
- Expired pages: decide a policy per content type. Delisted product — redirect to the category or keep the page with clear status and alternatives. Closed listing — remove from the index. Do not leave thousands of them indexable.
- Thin generated pages: block internal search results and empty filter combinations from crawling.
- Unanswered Q&A: either get answers or keep them out of the index.
The proportion point
This framework judges sites as well as pages. A good site with a large expired archive is measured on the mixture, which makes deletion and consolidation genuine ranking work — the opposite of the instinct that more indexed pages is better.
How we apply this
The proportion rule is the one we build cleanup projects around: it is not that an expired page ranks badly, it is that enough of them drag down everything else. For marketplace and classifieds clients this is usually the single biggest available improvement, and it is achieved by removing pages rather than adding them — which is a difficult conversation until Baidu’s own wording is on the table.
Related services