Baidu’s General Manager of “Search Ecology Business” Xie Tian said on Baidu Union Summit held in May: “A new era of Baidu search has come, which sees transformation from websites to accounts, and this is a dimension upgrade.” Similar voices are repeated in promotions of Baidu’s Bear Paw Account.
“The reason why Baidu put so much emphasis on Bear Paw account is that, Baidu still cannot resolve black-hat SEO tactics till today,” writes a SEO from Beijing on his Baijia account, an earlier Baidu account product launched before Bear Paw account.
This is half right, another reason is that blogs or websites have almost lost their glamour for good writers, who are now enjoying applause on their WeChat Subscription accounts. Well, one of the reasons for this is also that Baidu cannot distinguish original sources of online content from plagiarisms, a regular way of so called black-hat SEO.
However, another important reason is that this is an era of “accounts” in China. Just like a famous saying on Douyin – an extremely popular short-video app in China: “When you become successful, your bullshits are golden sayings, but when you are not successful, your golden sayings are bullshits.”
Compared to writing a blog, people find it much easier to become famous on social networks like WeChat and Douyin, and after they get famous, they don’t always have to provide quality content to attract visitors, as even “bullshits” could satisfy their fans in some way. And they don’t need Baidu anymore like their we-media predecessors.
So, by launching Bear Paw account, Baidu is trying to kill two birds with one stone: encouraging qualified webmasters and bloggers to submit their original content to Baidu so that the search engine could identify original content in a more accurate way, and helping them get fans via a “follow” button on their Bear Paw accounts.
However, is Baidu still a pure search engine in this way? It’s hard to determine, because Baidu is just trying to improve its search experience as it is not as good as Google in identifying original content, and it is also trying to help webmasters increase their exposure on the web by adapting itself to the social heat on Chinese internet.
But things could be different for many Chinese SEOs if Bear Paw account succeeds here.
“According to Baidu’s official data, Bear Paw accounts are displayed in more and more search results. So what’s the future of SEO? Maybe we should never teach our boss how to use Bear Paw accounts,” writes the same Beijing SEO.
This is certainly not a reliable solution – you cannot stop a better thing by simply not teaching others to use it. But anyhow, it is a problem for gray-hat SEOs or black-hat SEOs in China to worry about.
As white-hat SEOs who are committed to combining SEO optimization with content marketing, we believe that as long as search engines are useful, Jinray SEO Agency from China can always help its clients improve their online content, for both better user experience and rankings that they deserve.