Baidu SEO Myth II – Relevancy between Baidu Cache Recency and Baidu SEO Performance

The second Baidu SEO myth is Baidu Cache Recency. There are assumptions in Baidu SEO world that there is a correlation between Baidu Cache Recency and the website’s SEO performance. But again Lee denied the relevancy of Baidu cache update frequency and Baidu SEO performance.

What is Baidu Cache Recency?

Indexation is one of the most important metrics for Baidu SEO, not only in the stage of new site that you want Baidu display all pages, but also after you complete some ad-hoc changes on the onpage attributes you want to see those changes have been reflected on search engine. But the tricky part is that Baidu doesn’t always display the most recent version of your page on Search Engine Result Page (SERP). From time to time you may find page cache is dated around two years ago even the page content has been updated several times. However big sites like news portals usually have their latest pages indexed on Baidu.  Baidu SEO professionals believe that having the newest pages indexed on Baidu in prompt time is a very important indication that the site is favored by Baidu. And checking the date of the site pages cache on Baidu is the way to determine whether your sites are Baidu’s favorites.

How to check Baidu Cache Recency?

Though Baidu Webmaster Tools monitor your website indexation daily, you can only view which page URLs indexed instead of which version of the pages. SEO specialists are still struggling in finding out whether the indexed page is the old page or the new one with optimized info. Therefore SEO specialist have to use site command on Baidu search box to list all the page cache and check the cache date to determine whether the changes take effect on Baidu.

Why Baidu denies it?

Baidu Search Spokesman Lee explained that Baidu spider crawled the different versions of the page and stored them on the server, but only indexes the version Baidu thinks the most authoritative and relevant, rather than the latest one. The reason news portal has their latest pages indexed is because they are trusted source of news, and content freshness accounts more weight in Baidu’s algorithm for this particular type of websites. This means for other types of websites, Baidu may have other factors than content freshness in deciding which version of the page should be indexed. Non-news sites that have been scraping others’ content and rehashing it on their own site may find Baidu’s this particular algorithm tweak is targeting them. But Baidu leaves a backdoor for webmasters to submit their new page individually if the existing one on SERP is the old version.

Takeaways

Firstly, relevancy between Baidu Cache Recency and SEO for Baidu performance only works with websites with large amount of fresh content.

Secondly, for other websites changing the product/solution page’s onpage attributes doesn’t have the similar effects as news portal generating fresh content, so change them only when it’s necessary.

Thirdly, for non-news sites, scraping other content and rehashing on their own are not working anymore.