It is of no secret that I can be a bit “weeabooish” when it comes to Japan (and Asia in general) so it’s no surprise that my first public WordPress plugin is a Baidu indexation speedup plugin.
Baidu si basically “China’s Google”. Due to the ever expanding China’s economy Baidu gets about 1 million English queries per day and holds over 70% of all searches done in Asia. Most of other localized search engines in Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan also use Baidu’s database. Simply put if you want your website to be known is Asia, this is the proper way to start.
More about Baidu (statistics and such) will be covered in one of my next posts.
So you may be wondering as to why do you need a tutorial for a simple singup.
Well… it’s mostly due to two things;
- The main signup link has been locked to allow singups only to phone numbers located in mainland China.
- It’s in Chinese :).
So to start off we need to visit the signup form that allows foreign phone numbers. The link is currently not publicly listed since Baidu has been trying to get their English version of the page up and running for about a year now (currently with no luck):
Registration link
So now we just simply fill out the form as you can see in the images bellow:
The text comes to your phone:
So now input the code into your registration form. And click the blue button 注册 (Registration). If the code you provided is correct you will see the following:
Getting your site listed and indexed is quite a long journey but we will get to it in the next posts.
In the meantime if your hosting provider uses ModSecurity and Immunify360 to keep your hosting safe from attacks kindly ask them to remove the “Bad Bot Baidu” rule. Otherwise Baidu’s indexation bot will not be able to index your site.