Baidu Webmaster Tools Features

                 Baidu Webmaster Tools

There are five categories for Baidu’s Webmaster Tools (BWT) (see below). I will discuss the tools that most impact any decision to enter China, namely sections two through four:
1. Mobile Section
2. Crawling
3. Search Appearance
4. Optimization & Maintenance
5. Website Components

Crawling

·        Baidu offers tools for URL submissions, robots testing and crawl diagnosis.
·        The robots tool is beginner-friendly, as it allows you to enter rules in a text field and test them against a specified URL.
·        Crawl diagnosis is as expected, with reports for crawl frequency, error reports.
·        “fetch as Baidu” tool, which will fetch the URL entered and evaluate the page for any errors due to redirects, servers, robots and your usual 404 errors.
·        The weakness of Baidu’s tool is that it only evaluates the first 200 kb, and only for the few kinds of errors above.

·        You may submit new pages on your site with the URL submission tool (single or in bulk), and you can even submit external inbound links.

·        You can submit new content to Baidu programmatically with CURL and POST commands, as well as via PHP and RUBY.

·        With respect to indexing new content, this puts a degree of control in the webmaster’s hands that doesn’t exist in Google.

·        Sitemaps are supported but only as a premium feature. I couldn’t submit a sitemap, and the tooltip seems to suggest that only websites with a high authority will have the privilege of submitting new content to Baidu via sitemap.

·        If you can’t programmatically submit new content, there is a section for manual submission of new pages. It might be time now to start mending fences with your CTO who you’ve been pestering for more structured markup on-site.

·        There is also a tool for submission of pages for deindexing (死链提交). I’ll call this the page-dumping tool. This is clearly a very important one, as they permit submissions of sitemap URLs (ending in txt or xml), though generally not from new users.

·        They even let you define the crawl frequency for your magnificent page-dumping sitemap!

·        Removal of dead links is clearly a massive priority for Baidu. If you don’t have a document detailing trashed pages, you can submit subfolders.

·        Their toolkit for clearing obsolete content is so extensive that they’ll even let you define error pages for 3 types of errors, namely HTTP 404 errors, soft 404 errors, and HTTP redirects due to errors.

·        There is also a meta tag which tells Baidu that this page is obsolete: <meta name=”baidu-deadlink” value=”1″>

Search Appearance

·        In website settings （站点属性), you can set your site’s Chinese name, upload a logo (if your site has reached Baidu’s threshold of importance)

·        Set the appropriate toggle for your website’s mobile-responsiveness.

·        Select your industry and input a customer service phone number. These aren’t very remarkable features technically but they are extremely important for building trust with Chinese consumers and putting your company in front of them.
·        Baidu supports sitelink extensions. However, this feature is in the beta-testing stage and participation requires submission of an application.
·        There is also a beta program for data markup in the categories of video, software and games.
·        Baidu is clearly playing catch up here, but for those of us who have benefited from the sitelinks and Rich Snippets that Google supports, we’re ready to jump on these beta programs immediately.

·        The only concession to a western audience that can be seen in the Webmaster Tools is Baidu’s Structured Data Plugin for WordPress.

·        According to Baidu, this plugin helps them speed up indexation of your discussion threads and content, and automatically generates a sitemap that gets submitted to Baidu, which is one way to get around the lack of a sitemap submission ability in the default Webmaster Tools feature set. It is extremely clear that a company that wants to enter China would do well to adopt WordPress and install the Baidu plugin

Optimization and Maintenance

·        Baidu’s search analytics tool provides keyword data

·        For Baidu Webmaster Tools, data from as recent as 5 hours ago and no earlier than 30 days ago are available

·        Top landing pages can be seen, and the same reports are available for mobile too. It’s adequate

·         Tool for page optimization suggestions

·        For link metrics, Baidu lists found external links and dead links under their links analysis tool. Baidu groups internal dead links, outbound dead links and inbound dead links in 1 report, and gives you a tab for inbound links. In GWT, only inbound dead links are reported as crawl errors.

·        The safety tool deduces whether your site carries trojan horse software, is guilty of phishing, general fraud or just generally violates Baidu’s terms of use

·        The vulnerability tool checks whether your site is vulnerable to common hacks like SQL query injection and cross-domain scripting.

·        There’s also one for site migrations / URL structure changes.

·        Unique to Baidu is their site closure tool. When you submit your website to the tool, Baidu will stop crawling your website and archive your indexed pages

·        Baidu’s own documentation states that it preserves Baidu’s index of your pages, but not your rankings

Highlights of BWT:

ü  You can submit new content through CURL, POST, PHP and RUBY

ü   Never let obsolete content / dead links fester on your site

ü   Build trust with Chinese consumers through submitting basic company info such as service hotlines

ü  Use WordPress with the Baidu plugin

Reference: Baidu Webmaster Tool Features

Importance of Hreflang Tags

When Site has is targeting many countries and it has different version of the home page depending upon the geo location.
At that time it is very helpful to use hreflang tag to tell the google to show which version for particular area.
It is different from canonical tag and but helps the site to be crawl by search engine with in local search engines.

Hreflang can be implemented in 3 ways.
1)Head element in web page(for the page level)
2)Http Header(Use when page is not in Html)
3)Sitemap(use when the site has large number of pages)

If your site is multi-regional and multilingual , then you should mention the hreflang tag with respected language with country name in the source page.
So that it is easy crawled by google and shown in the search engine of particular region with respected language.

According to the some of the case studys, it have impact on the use of hreflang tag in the site.
It works by page by page, but not whole on the site.
For more clarificatoin you can check here. Use of Hreflang Tags

Case study of hreflang

Mobile Xml Site Map Tool

Everybody know about xml sitemap for website. But for mobile optimization , we need to have xml sitemap for mobile version.
I have searched  online and got a good tool to build the mobile xml sitemap for proper SEO.

If you want crawl URLs of mobile version of site properly you need to insert

<mobile:mobile/> for every page you add in the site.

Normal free xml sitemap generators wont give this type of version.

Mobile Xml Sitemap Genertor

To know more information on mobile sitemap optimization refer to Google

Broken Links Checker | Dead Link Checker

Would you like to check the broken links of your sites and you need free seo tools to check the broken links.Here are some of the tools  i have tried regularly to check broken links of my sites.

you want try now:
 Broken Link Check Tool1
 Broken Link Checker Tool2
Broken Link Checker Tool3

Sandbox - Google Sandbox

Sandbox is term we generally use to hear in computer security.In computer terminology , we say it is a security mechanism or tool  for separating running programs because of their uniqueness.so that it won't effect other programs flow.

what we are going to discuss is what is sandbox effect in seo. how it is effecting the seo optimization.
or how it is related to Google.Sandbox is  a name given to an observation about how Google rank web pages in its index.

so coming to Sandbox effect?why now a days we are talking about this is - The sites which are getting more back or inbound links from high page rank sites are going to Google Sandbox.Based on observations, It have an effect of  drastic fall of position in Google SERP's and so that it is not easy to get good position again.

They are saying their own version for this effect, they would call it as a Restriction on new sites, which will be indexed and getting high position in SERPs in short span of time.They call it as restriction for 3 months, to eradicate the spam sites being listed in SERPs.

Recently we have been seing more queries  regarding  this effect on their sites. Normally for the sites which are getting 2 or more backlinks  PR 6 sites are getting into sandbox.It would be like a probation period for the new sites, which want to be listed in top position in short span of time.The links which are natural , it won't have any effect.Because now the Google Algorithm is changed and giving more importance to the  Fresh content.

Search Engine Major Goals

Search Engines follow their own criteria for searching the web.Search Engine crawl the web through specific parameters.

In Search Engine crawling , they crawl the web mainly by checking the html codes of pages. They see the meta tags of the page. Depending upon the description they crawl the respective page and it also crawl all the links to that page. So it will collect all the pages and check the duplication of links in the step.

The next step Indexing i.e.,after collecting all the pages, it will index the pages based on the particular phrase or key word in the database and it will arrange pages based on the specific terms and their synonyms.

The next step is Querying i.e., responding to user queries is main aspect of Search Engines. How fast it can respond to the user queries is given main importance. So that , the data should be relevant and appropriate . so that he can visit again and again further in future for any thing. It will respond to the queries with giving options for searching for  a particular word or word + some extra.So that it will give flexibility to the users search for  a wide info with a single click.

The next step is Ranking i.e., ranking of a site or web page .so it's purely based on the algorithm of the Search Engine it follows. Every search engine follows their own algorithm to rank a website . Mainly the check the Quality Content and meta tags and proper linking of internal pages etc..in ranking a website. 

example:- Google is giving ranking to a websites.it's ranking is purely based on their priority and rules they follow.

so we will discuss it later when we discuss about page rank.

How Search Engine works?

It is really important to know how Search Engine works before doing any SEO work. because unless you know how it works? you are not able to do understand the real meaning of Optimizing the Search Engine.

so let's start our discussion from Search Engine work.Later we will discuss the Directory work structure.

                                

I would say we have a lot of Search Engines available world wide...google, inktomi, baidu(china), naver(korea), alltheweb. Does every search engine follows same strategy ?If so what is the pros  & cons.

Generally individually every Search Engine has their own algorithm. It follow their work based on them. Generally search engines update the database for 3 months.
So major goals and functions of Search Engine would be:
 1) Crawling of the web pages based on search engine algorithm.
 2) Indexing the web pages by selecting proper content on specific keyword.
 3) Responding to the user queries by relevant pages.
 4) Ranking of the pages .