Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, has apparently cut off access to Google’s company blog, after a post appeared there detailing the latter company’s decision to cease cooperation with the Chinese government over concerns with censorship and cyber crime.
Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan reports that, while the blog entry is easily available on many other websites, the original entry does not appear on any of Baidu’s SERPs. Additionally, Sullivan says, searching for "site: googleblog.blogspot.com" returns a connection-reset error and temporarily bans users from using Baidu.
Users on tech website Slashdot’s forums reported a similar lockout resulting from a site search for Google’s company blog, saying that the ban lasted between five and 10 minutes, with all searches or attempts to connect to Baidu’s site blocked by error messages. Other controversial words and phrases resulted in similar bans, including "Falun Gong."
Baidu, which continues to cooperate fully with the Chinese government’s censorship rules, will now be more or less unchallenged as the primary search engine optimization (SEO) target for the Chinese internet marketplace, according to SEO experts.
