Even if the Internet in China, especially in the transactional area, is not quite as online shop-driven as in Europe or the USA, but rather takes place on platforms such as Taobao or JD (comparable to Amazon Marketplace in Germany), it is still important for a Western brand that wants to trade in China to operate an official website on which customers can quench their thirst for knowledge about the brand, the company mission and, of course, the products.
It should be noted that Chinese customers also prefer branded products to the many cheap copies available on every corner. The "Made in Germany" brand is a quality criterion. Even though many Western companies have their products manufactured in China and sell them officially in China and in Germany, customers who have the opportunity prefer to buy products reimported from Germany because they assume better workmanship and strict quality control.
This is not a call to import goods produced in China into Germany and then send them back to China and make them available to millions of people there. This is simply a testament to the quality standards that Chinese end consumers expect from products from Europe and the USA.
This quality standard has also been transferred to the Internet and web searches for some time now.
In May 2016, Baidu was caught up in this quality claim and held sweden phone number data accountable by the Chinese government: Clinics had placed ads on Baidu for surgical methods that in some cases led to the death of patients. Instead of just holding the clinics accountable, Baidu was accused of providing them with a platform.
Screenshot: The largest ecommerce website has no ads in Baidu search between May 2016 and July 2017.
Baidu had to accept the consequences and has paused the entire Baidu Ads program with immediate effect. From then on, no company was able to place paid ads in Baidu search. Baidu must have made billions in losses at that time. This financial dry spell lasted until July 2017 - more than 12 months - during which Baidu probably worked intensively on revising the ads already stored in the system and forced to be paused, as well as on guidelines, automatic comparison mechanisms and other methods to ensure the quality of ads in the future and to directly block health-critical topics.
We can see from this example that the topics of “expertise” and “trust” must also be important for Baidu, whereas in the past “authority” was the main aspect that Baidu trusted more superficially.
Reason enough to take a look at how Baidu can handle the evaluation of expertise, authority and trust, or how we as search engine optimizers can pay more attention to demonstrating our expertise, trust and perhaps a little authority to Baidu.
The following discussions are not ranking factors publicly communicated by Baidu, but rather derivations from observations of Baidu search results.