Baidu is China’s leading search engine, holding over 70% of the country’s search market. If you want your business to thrive in China’s digital landscape, Baidu is a good way to become visible.

Baidu Webmaster Tools (also known as Baidu Ziyuan 百度搜索资源平台) is a free platform for managing your site’s visibility on Baidu. Similar to Google Search Console, it helps website owners monitor indexing, fix crawl errors, analyze backlinks, and track search performance.

This guide breaks down how to set up and maximize Baidu Webmaster tools for your site.

TL;DR: Baidu Webmaster Tools is Baidu’s official platform for website management, offering tools for indexing, traffic analysis, and mobile optimization. This guide provides step-by-step instructions for setup and advanced optimization tips.

Registering for a Baidu account

To start using Baidu Webmaster Tools, you’ll need a Baidu account. Registration requires a valid Chinese phone number, as verification codes are sent via SMS. Follow these steps:

Visit Baidu's registration page by clicking the blue button in the top right of Baidu’s home page.

https://www.baidu.com/

Click the button in the bottom right of the pop-up to register if you don’t already have an account.

https://www.baidu.com/

Fill in your personal information, including your phone number.

https://passport.baidu.com/v2

Verify your account by entering the code sent to your phone.

Once registered, you can access Baidu Webmaster Tools (Baidu Ziyua - 百度搜索资源平台).

Chinafy tip: If you don’t have access to a Chinese phone number, consider working with a local partner or service to help facilitate the process.

Verifying your website

After creating a Baidu account, you must verify ownership of your website to unlock all the tools Baidu Webmaster Tools offers.

You can do this by navigating to the website management section of Baidu Webmaster Tools.

用户中心 (User Center) - 站点管理 (Site Management) - https://ziyuan.baidu.com/

There are two verification options:

HTML Tag Verification: Add a meta tag provided by Baidu to the section of your homepage.

File Upload Verification: Upload a specific HTML file to your server's root directory.

Post-verification, you can track and manage your website’s performance on Baidu.

Submitting your sitemap and URLs

Submitting a sitemap and key URLs ensures Baidu crawls your site effectively.

Sitemap Submission: Go to the "Link Submission" section in Baidu Webmaster Tools and enter your sitemap URL. This tells Baidu’s crawlers where to find your site’s pages.

Individual URL Submission: For newly added or high-priority pages, use the URL submission tool to ensure quick indexing.

Regularly submitting updated sitemaps and URLs keeps Baidu informed about changes to your site.

Chinafy advantage: Websites optimized by Chinafy automatically push updated URLs to Baidu, saving you time.

Key features of Baidu Webmaster Tools

Similarly to Google Search Console, Baidu Webmaster Tools offers a wide range of features to help you monitor and improve your website’s performance, including:

Traffic Analysis: Monitor impressions and clicks from Baidu’s organic search results, as well as top-performing keywords.

Crawl Error Reports: Identify and fix technical issues that prevent Baidu’s crawlers from accessing your content.

Backlink Insights: Analyze your backlinks to understand how external sites link to your content.

Mobile Optimization Checker: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as mobile usage dominates in China.

By regularly reviewing these features, you can fine-tune your site to meet Baidu's standards.

https://ziyuan.baidu.com/

Best practices for Baidu optimization

To achieve optimal performance on Baidu, follow these best practices:

Improve site speed and functionality - Baidu flags slow sites as low quality, which hurts your chances of showing up in search results. Most global sites suffer web performance issues in China because of infrastructure and code incompatibilities with China’s internet ecosystem. Resolving these issues goes beyond solely hosting your site in China or using a CDN.

Index your URLs - you can submit your sitemaps or URLs for indexing using Baidu webmaster tools, where you’ll also be able to view SEO settings and analyze the performance of your site on Baidu. (Note: Chinafy auto-pushes your URLs to Baidu.)

Prioritize mobile optimization - Baidu is mobile-first, so if your site is fully optimized for mobile users, this will reflect in your Baidu ranking. To do this, you need to make sure your site is mobile-friendly, such as having a responsive design, optimized images for mobile loading, and minimal dynamic elements.

Regularly update your content - Like Google, Baidu favors fresh content, making it essential to update your website regularly with high-quality, relevant material. Whether through blogs, articles, or other types of content, maintaining a frequent publishing schedule is key to maintaining visibility on Baidu.

Localize your content - if it makes sense for your business to build a website uniquely for its Chinese audience, then localizing everything from content to metadata to URLs and tags in Simplified Chinese will contribute to higher rankings on Baidu.

For more tips on how to rank on Baidu, refer to our previous article: Baidu China SEO Guide.

Baidu Webmaster Tools is an essential platform for any business targeting the Chinese market. From website verification to traffic analysis, it provides the tools you need to optimize for Baidu’s ecosystem.

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