China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Recently there were some updates on the agenda: typo3 has a new version with a lot of improved features, phpBB3 had to be updated, dolphin and of course wordpress. The wordpress update is finished now and I have to admit that it will take some time to get used to the new backend. But in general it feels looks like a big improvement.

Chinese New Year - Part II.

Beijing really gone crazy – unbelievable

I am often asked this question but actually sometimes I wonder if I even know how to do SEO for Google. They do not publish their ranking criteria of course; they only give some hints in their Google guidelines for webmasters.
If you follow those guidelines, you can’t go wrong with your site.
For Baidu, the most popular Chinese search engines, there seem to be some differences to Google:

1. the filename and domain name seem to be more relevant for Baidu than for Google
2. Except of the title-tag, the meta-tags are not important for most western search engines, for Baidu, they are still more important
3. Internal links and the linktext in those links are more important for Baidu than for Google.
4. For Google incoming links from other websites are the most important ranking criteria. For Google, the quality of those incoming links is more important than for Baidu. For Baidu, the number of links is more important.

Somehow it seems to me, that the Google algorithm is more advanced and for Baidu you have to do more “old-fashioned” SEO.

Some more hints for foreign companies, which want a Chinese website:

• Most important: Don’t save money by hiring an inexperienced translator. Do a professional translation of your site and let it proofread again and again by an expert in your business field
• Use a cn-Domain for your website. Also foreign companies are allowed to register cn-Domains without having a Chinese admin-c (in Germany, you need a German administrator for your de-Domain, if the owner does doesn’t reside in Germany
• Host your website in China if you only target the Chinese market but don’t try to save too much money on web space. Many companies I know spent thousand of Euro on their website but are not willing to spend 10 Euro more per month for a good server. Beware that your website might be slow from outside China. If your website also has an English version, this should not be hosted in China but in the US or Europe.

After a two week hiatus, Youtube, a Google-owned video sharing network, is back online.

There is no official answer as to why Youtube was blocked for a two week period by the Chinese internet regulators. Speculations have narrowed the filtration to either the 17th National Communist Party Congress, which is China’s most important meeting of political leaders that discuss the future of China held every five years, or the unveiling of the Taiwan version of Youtube. The YouTube Taiwan site is also accessible in China.

More on chinaorbit news

I found the website of a competitor of a potential client in Beijing. This competitor did not pay his web designer. The result was a very ugly website, “for sale” remark and a direct link to the website of my client. In Germany, I would get a nice letter by a lawyer for this kind of “payment reminder” very quickly.

Nostalgic Trips in China - you really should think twice before deciding to go back to a place, which is connected with some memories and you have not visited for a few years in China - often you will be disappointed. Cities in China change very fast and many buildings are demolished and replaced by big department stores or office buildings.

8 years ago, I studied Chinese for one year in Hangzhou and recently I visited this city for the first time since then. I expected that the city probably changed but when I arrived, I was really surprised about the dimension of the changes.

First, the good news

• the famous west lake does still exist
• the old woman opposite xixi-campus of the Zhejiang University (still called Hangzhou University during my stay in Hangzhou) still sold telephone cards at exactly the same place.
• the old supermarket at xixilu does still exist
• and the paradise club in Hangzhou still exists (okay, I have not been there so often, but this club was the meeting point of foreigners at weekends - now there are a lot of more western style bars in Hangzhou)

Hangzhou changed a lot during the last few years; the best way to prove this is to count the number of McDonald’s and also the number of new restaurants, clubs and hotels at the west lake.
The students’ dormitory in xixi campus is knocked down (it was very old already, when I lived there). The Hangda Lu, which used to be full of small rundown restaurants, is full of modern department stores and office buildings.
In spite of all those changes and the development of the Westlake area – Hangzhou is still a place you should visit if you plan to travel through China.

Okay, it is not really worth even mentioning it anymore - the blog service blogspot.com is blocked again, at least from Beijing, you can not reach it anymore. Really a pity, I can only watch the blogs of employees via very slow proxy-services. One possibility is www.anonymouse.org.

What news in Beijing? Quite funny (but also a little bit sad to watch) was a raid on illegal street sellers at Wudaokou subway station in Beijing. During the last weeks, more and more street sellers occupied the wudaokou area in Beijing, first at the south-west corner. I guess some of the shop owners were not really happy about it, so they moved to the north-corner (the police watching just opposite the street), later they occupied the area directly at the subway station, it was hard using the sidewalk. I guess this was a little bit too much, yesterday the crossroad was cleared by the police and you could watch them taking the goods from crying saleswomen and arguing salesmen.

Here you can find an interesting interview with Matt Cutts about SEO in China. Good to know, that he loves Chinese food.

Interview with Matt Cutts on Search and SEO in China

If I build up a website, I make it user friendly but also search engine friendly. The goal is to get

a) visitors
b) make the visitors becoming real customers

A few days ago, I had a meeting with a potential client about their website. It seems, that they invested some time and money in building it up, it was a website with great flash animations, I really liked the design
There where just a few problems

1. The website was 100% in flash, which means, not very search engine friendly. If you make a flash website, at least the text should be in normal HTML. You can use flash animations for websites, but if you really want to get customers with this website and want to be found in search engines, do not make the website 100% in flash.
2. The target group where foreign customers, the website was hosted in Hong Kong. From Germany, it took about one minute for each page to load, because each time, the browser had to load some flash animations again. Even if they use adwords for this site, I don’t think, many customers (with a very fast DSL-connection) are patient enough to find the contact information.
3. The funniest thing was, that to load the flash design on the main page, the graphic designer used java script. Search engines can not follow java script links, which means, for search engines, the website had no content at all. When I turned off java script to demonstrate, how google sees this website, the result was an empty white screen and the marketing director of the company was not very pleased, about this, I think.

Anyway, the graphic designer did a great job, the website looked great, but I think, the company can only use it as addition to their offline marketing material like flyers, namecards, but for sure, nobody will find this website with search engines (allthough, the client told me, that this was the goal of the website). Even if they use paid advertisment, to get visitors, I do not believe, that they will get many inquiries. To be successful, they actually have to rebuild the whole website.