Baidu 520 incident
The large-scale Baidu ranking fluctuation event on May 20 was called the Baidu 520 incident. I think webmasters will remember what happened deeply. They watched the rankings they worked so hard to achieve drop to dozens of pages overnight. In addition, I must be very confused in my heart. Although I have had this experience in the past, this experience is different from the past, because if we carefully observe the rankings, we can easily find that a large number of B2B and portal pages have been ranked higher.
Take the term Shanghai SEO that I am paying attention to. It is very competitive. The websites that were previously ranked on the homepage were many senior ones with quite high weights. But why were they also affected by this update and not directly ranked in the dozens? There are various speculations and overwhelming anger outside the page. Related posts can be seen everywhere in several major webmaster forums such as seowhy, admin5 and chinaz. The answer was revealed a few hours later. The following is the official explanation given by Baidu.
"Thank you very much for your great attention to Baidu.
The details of this matter are complicated, but in short: There was something wrong with our system during the process of updating data. After the problem was discovered in time, it was fixed at noon on May 20. Currently, some content is still due to caching and other reasons. Updating is in progress and will be back to normal soon.
In the future, we will strengthen the corresponding guarantee mechanism to avoid similar problems from happening again. At the same time, I'm sorry for causing some misunderstandings. "
After a few hours of cache updating, the rankings of most sites have now returned to normal.
Question: Why does Baidu have problems updating data?
Regarding this question, I think the first feeling of many webmasters is manual intervention.
Friends who have read Pan Haidong’s Three Questions to Robin Li should know: Baidu’s database is divided into several databases. These databases divide websites into several weights. Websites with high weights are placed in certain databases, and sites with low weights are placed in other databases. Someone once told me this: For the websites of gov departments, major news media, and in order to protect the authority of some brands, Baidu will give them very high weights and good rankings. Baidu will not touch these websites, but for most small and medium-sized websites, Baidu can say that it will kill you whenever it wants. It will even blacklist them and never include them. They will never get any traffic from Baidu. Therefore, he believes that website optimization is to mix traffic under Baidu's nose, do your best to build external links, and try your best to obtain traffic, because no one dares to say that your website will never be K.
User experience: the long-term solution for website development
From the Baidu 520 incident, we can see that Baidu's manual intervention is indeed very serious, but in Gao Wenliang's view, his biggest mistake was to ignore user experience. User experience is the essence of a website's long-term development.
I have also met friends in many forums and QQ groups who complained that Baidu's manual intervention was too serious. Here Gao Wenliang would like to ask them: Have you really done a good job in user experience? Of course, some friends will ask, is it interactive encyclopedia, Sosou Is the user experience of QQ not good? Why doesn’t Baidu rank them or give them traffic? Yes, this can indeed be said to be Baidu’s unfair competition, but Gao Wenliang believes that it is only limited to a small part. , threatening part of Baidu’s interests. Just imagine how many domestic webmasters can threaten Baidu’s interests?
Some friends also say that Baidu is biased and things with high weight are its own products, such as Baidu Encyclopedia, Baidu Knows, etc., but have you discovered that Baidu Knows and Baidu Encyclopedia has a poor user experience? And Baidu has always been careful Do user experience. Not long ago, Gao Wenliang saw the questionnaire on Baidu Encyclopedia. What does this mean? Baidu is also doing its best to improve the user experience! If he has done a good job in user experience, he is qualified to be ranked at the front of the search results.
Speaking of user experience, seowhy's user experience can be said to be very good. There have been two ranking fluctuations. Teacher Wu Wei said it was the impact of changing IPs, but it happened again soon. What does this mean? Gao Wenliang thinks the most important thing is The main thing is user experience. Let’s just imagine, what would be the consequences if Baidu blacklisted seowhy? I think everyone can guess the result without me saying much. Therefore, Baidu will not blacklist seowhy, and Baidu will not manually intervene in a website with a very good user experience.
Please remember that Baidu is ultimately a search engine. The most important task of a search engine is to provide a good user experience and provide the highest quality content to users. If Baidu is really, as the friend above said, unreasonable K sites and leaving no K sites with good user experience, then the result will inevitably be a loss of users, a loss of the market, and eventually it will face the point of closing down.
As webmasters, we don’t need to worry about Baidu’s next move, how to make money, or how to suppress its opponents. These are all things that businessmen should think about. As long as we provide a good user experience, no matter how many Baidus come to The 520 incident will not affect us, and how many interactive encyclopedias and how many Sosou questions do you think we can have between us?
This article is original to Gao Wenliang SEO blog, original address: http://www.gwlseo.com/20110581.html , please retain the copyright for reprinting.
The author's personal space