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In China, Google enjoys only a 27% market share; much second fiddle to (Baidu) with 55%. Similarly, in Russia, Google ranks third, with (Yandex) the clear leader. More than 50% of the growth in Internet users between 2007 and 2010 is likely to come from these huge countries. Isn’t it time to consider a listing on your major search engines? This short article looks at what is required for your site to be crawled.

The growth of the Internet in China and Russia

Russia is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and the most populous country in Europe. Internet penetration in Russia currently stands at just 19.5% (compared to 69.9% in the United States). In China, penetration is only 10.9% (in a population four times that of the US). Penetration levels in Western Europe and North America appear to have stabilized and it seems unlikely that they will grow significantly in the future. Most of the new Internet users around the world will come from India and China. Most of the new European users will come from Russia. A wave of change is sweeping the web as we speak, and 18 months from now, China will overtake the US as the largest online Internet community.

Is Google close to the height of its powers?

He poses an interesting question; Is Google in fact at its zenith? Most commentators put Google’s current underlying market share (in advanced western economies) at about 75%. However, what will its share of the global market be in five years? Even if they slightly increase their presence in Russia and China, their overall global share will fall, simply because of the law of averages. It would be very unwise, at this point, to discount the growing importance of these new competitors!

Get included in Yandex

Yandex does not accept site submissions from sites hosted outside of Russia. However, this does not mean that domain names must end in .ru (Russia) or .ua (Ukraine). In fact, any site with an IP address in a Russian-speaking country or with pages in Russian will eventually be indexed by the search engine. Try comparing a search for “Intel” with a search for “Amazon.” You will notice that Intel, which has a part of its site in Russian, performs better than Amazon. Take a look at this page from Ice Graphics which, unlike Amazon, achieves (only) a top 10 result for the search phrase “books” in Yandex (despite being an English site hosted in the US). USA). This is due to the presence of Russian text on the page (even the text is not correctly labeled as Russian in HTML or Meta-Language tags).

So the first rule you need to learn for Yandex is to have some Russian text for your Russian clients. Generally, it will be best to include any Russian text with the correct W3C markup. For example, the following Russian phrase (roughly equivalent to “he who gets up early catches the worm”) would be coded as follows:


</p> <p> <span lang = "RU"> 0 == OO? B0H: 0 G5 @ 2O: 0;> 28B.<br />

The second rule you should learn is that Yandex will index your page faster if it is linked to sites hosted in Russia. For example, Ice Graphics is linked from computerra.ru, ebdb.ru, and more. Personally, I recommend clients to look for listings in 5-6 quality Russian-based bilingual directories. Visit my blog to see some examples.

Join Baidu

The first point to keep in mind is that Baidu, unlike Google, merges its organic results with the paid results from its paid listing service. As such, the fastest way to achieve a higher ranking on Baidu is to participate in their paid service. Since there is no English Baidu ad interface (yet), the best way to do this is to use an agent.

To rank well organically, you must first realize that the Chinese search audience is very synocentric. The landing page must be entirely in Chinese and presented in Chinese style. This inevitably means using the services of a Chinese translator (and possibly also a web designer). Note that while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, Simplified Chinese will be sufficient to serve all markets. The entire web page must be encoded using a Simplified Chinese language declaration in the page metadata:


</p> <p> Between labels <HEAD>: <META http-equiv = "Content-Language" content = "zh-CN"><br />

You can find some guide on the web that suggests the use of “zh-Hant”, which is the correct markup for simplified Chinese. However, I would stick with zh-CN for now, as it supports a wider range of web applications. When you’re ready, you can submit your site to Baidu from the following page:

Baidu URL Submission Page: http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html
Please note that Baidu does not guarantee that your site will be crawled and that your site must meet their posting guidelines.

Once listed on Baidu, you can improve your position by getting high-quality inbound links from Chinese directories. Many of the best directories (to go to) are those in Taiwan and Hong Kong (where Internet penetration has been highest for the longest time). Again, there are some suggestions on my blog. Good luck with the campaign and let me know if you need any help.

Conclusions

Remember, time and tide wait for no one and the early bird catches the worm, so get started with Yandex and Baidu before your competitors do!

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