According to a source in China, Baidu has planning to launch the site rank for all its members in the Baidu Union. It is a move for them to directly compete with Google, besides to maintain their leadership position in the Chinese market, as reported by iResearch China on the Web (in Mandarin). Prior to this, Baidu has ventured into the paid search market and sells the keywords to advertisers, and hence Baidu has turned the words into money, literally, some sort like Google AdWords strategy. Baidu has Baidu Jingjia, an AdWords-like system, and Baidu Guding, a fixed advertising fee for the advertisers and the advertisements would appeared in the right-hand side of the top in the Baidu’s search pages. Existing advertisers ran spectrum of companies, range from contractor services to cable businesses, and etc.
Now Baidu has planned to release site rank in order to provide extra services to its Baidu Union’s members. All of the members entitled to receive the monetary rewards from the scale of 30% to 50% for the Web traffics that the Web site of these members attracted. Site Rank will certainly complement the sponsored searches and contribute to a big portion of the Baidu’s annual revenue. With more than 110,000 members in the Baidu Union, the site rank release is a wise move for them to generate the stickiness amongst the members that they have now in China. Also, a lock-in strategy from having Google and Yahoo! China venture into their territories.
There seems to be a tendency to write off Baidu in China because of Google’s perceived greater relevance. This is a good reminder that Baidu won’t give any ground without a fight.