Baidu Mobile Search Optimization Guide

Baidu’s Mobile Search Optimization Guide and the companion Mobile Site Building White Paper cover the ground before the landing-page standard applies: how a mobile site should be built so it can be crawled, adapted and ranked at all.

Technology choice

Three approaches, in Baidu’s order of preference: responsive design (one URL, no adaptation to declare), dynamic serving (one URL, different code by device), and a separate mobile site (its own URLs and a declared adaptation relationship). The further down that list, the more machinery must be maintained and the more ways it can break.

Crawling requirements

• Mobile pages must be reachable by the mobile spider, answering 200.
• Resources needed to render the page — CSS and JavaScript — must not be blocked, or the page is judged on a broken rendering.
• Baiduspider reads text. Content in images, Flash or script is not indexed on mobile any more than on desktop.

Structure

The same flat tree recommended for desktop, with a working navigation reachable by text links, breadcrumbs on content-heavy sites, and every page linked from at least one place. Deep nesting costs more on mobile because the crawl path is longer and the user’s patience shorter.

The redirect trap

A separate mobile site typically redirects mobile visitors from PC URLs. Two rules follow: redirect page to corresponding page, never everything to the mobile home page; and make sure the redirect does not fire for the desktop spider, or the PC site becomes invisible.

What the guide leads to

Once the site is crawlable and adapted, the landing-page experience standard takes over with its published numbers — one-second first screen, main content over half the screen, 10pt text, no floating advertising, no permission walls. This guide is the prerequisite; that specification is the bar.

The summary we give clients

Build responsive, keep the assets crawlable, keep the structure flat, and then work to the white paper. Sites that skip the first step spend the rest of the engagement maintaining an adaptation relationship instead of improving the pages.