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As China’s leading search engine company, Baidu lives up to their mission of providing only the highest quality service to the public. Over the years, the company continues to expand their scope through creating various improvements on how people can view web pages on the Internet. Thus, Baidu rose to become one the most sought after search engine sites worldwide.

Baidu offers a wide range of services both for the public and their advertisers. Baidu Zhishu, one of the most recent additions in the company’s list of services, is an index of the latest trends in keyword searches. It presents the freshest and most popular searches made by millions of Baidu users in the country. In the Baidu Index, searches are categorized according to similar keywords, and are ranked based on how frequent people look for them. Also, users can search a keyword on the program and find out how many people looked for it in the past. With these, anyone can access the list of the top searches in the website in a certain time frame.

More about the Baidu Index
Aside from the hottest trends in the search engine, Baidu Index also provides news articles and charts connected to the keyword you are looking for. This is very helpful especially if you are searching for a relevant data that is currently in the news.

Using the Baidu Index
Baidu Index is such a very simple and easy to understand program. Here are the steps in making the most out of your Baidu Index. No sweat!

Go to the index site, index.baidu.com, you can view the hottest trends in the search engine. The website displays the most popular searches made by the people. This is usually according to a certain time frame; within the month, for example. Baidu Index allows its users to view the hottest searches for even a year ago. To use this option, just click in your desired time frame, namely one month ago, a quarter, half of the year and the year ago.

You can now view the latest and most popular searches in the website. However, if you want to know how often a particular keyword is searched by the site’s users, just type it in the search box provided. The searches with the same keyword are displayed, together with the number of people who searched for it. Charts and news articles connected to the keyword are also posted on your results.

You can look for various keyword searches on the program. Also, you can compare three keywords at a time.

The Internet is such a very huge community, with over a million websites, pages and even viruses interconnected with each other. It is so great and widespread that sometimes ideas and contents can be easily duplicated or copied. Or in some cases, an individual posts the exact same words on two different domains, making two distinct websites. However, they still contain the same substance and may be tracked down by various search technologies. These are called duplicate contents. And how innocent though you may be of copying someone’s work or posting your articles in different websites, it’s still important to know what duplicate contents are and how search technologies trace them.

What is a duplicate search?
A duplicate search is essentially the same content posted on two or more distinct websites. Duplicate articles, or any other web contents for that matter, may contain the exact word for word account of the original one, while some have only a few parts changed in them.

How Search Engines Find Duplicate Contents
Articles with duplicate content may seem harmless; nonetheless, it’s when search engines detect them that you might be at a risk.

Search bots crawl around the whole World Wide Web to provide results based on entered keywords. These bots are inclined to filter all the contents of various websites and dispose the unnecessary pages. When these bots trace duplicate materials, they will choose one article based on a certain standard. This article will be the one placed on the results list; and it might not be yours if you have a similar content.

Search engines use different ways to detect duplicate contents. Google, for example, sorts contents through indexing search engine. This is done through the careful comparison of the contents of the websites. If Google finds multiple websites containing the same content, they are then sorted and ranked according to the search engine’s criteria. Several adjustments are made in the search engine’s indexing, and only the article which topped the rank is displayed as a search result.

Here are some of the standards some other search technologies use to trace duplicate contents and eliminating them.

Product Specifications
There are a large number of products and services sold throughout the web. Also, there are as quite as many product descriptions available. More often than not, this gives rise to copying of reviews and articles. Other standards include changed print pages, canonicalization and the publishing of duplicate contents on different URL’s. While search engines actually attempt to trace the original one among the duplicate contents, it is still not that reliable. In the end, it’s a lot better just to avoid having one.

Search Engine Optimization, which is abbreviated as SEO, has become a leading Internet marketing tool. These days, if you want to reach a bigger market and earn bigger profits, you need to have a tried and tested strategy to be implemented in your website, which in itself must be designed in such a way as to attract and maintain customers. While SEO can be applied in any business from whichever part of the world, some countries have unique rules to follow which make business more challenging and exciting than usual.

For instance, the services for SEO in China are different from the services for SEO in the United States. For instance, Chinese companies generally charge by the keyword in SEO for the Chinese market. A top-ten listing for a particular “cool word” (a word that has low return results in Google) may cost you 8,000 RMB a word/year. On the other hand, a “hot word” (a word that has high return results) may cost you 20,000 to 30,000 RMB a word/year. It is important to understand and embrace this difference in SEO culture; that is the only way to ride it and make profit from it.

Baidu vs. Google: Content-consciousness is cool in China
Indeed, SEO for the Chinese market is unique. One concrete piece of evidence that China has a different SEO perspective is the fact that Baidu, not Google, dominates the search engines in this country. The primary reason for this, as experts have revealed in various studies, is Baidu’s content-oriented policy. Baidu is no doubt extra sensitive to the information posted in a blog or forum. Adult content, such as pornography, and forbidden words by the Chinese government, are a complete no-no if you want not just one page but the whole of your website to rank high in this search engine.

Of course, it is important to optimize page titles, headings, and keyword density. These factors all affect content description, which Baidu, the leading search engine in China, prioritizes. Do take note, however, that anchor-texts for incoming links, which seem to be an imperative SEO factor for Google, matters very little for Baidu, so do not dwell on these things if your target are Chinese search engines. Also, do not spend so much time duplicating content for SEO for the Chinese market – Baidu does not care much for this, either.

Content translation is also a key factor in the success of a blog for a business based in China. Automatic tools are available these days for translating site content. This can give you better exposure than you think; many bloggers using automatic tools for translation have reported relative success. Some companies even invest on human resources to have their blog or website’s content translated in order to reach the seemingly elusive – yet very loyal – Chinese Chinese audience.