While the prospective pullout of the world’s largest search engine from one of the world’s most important online markets is undoubtedly seismic news for the profession of search engine optimization (SEO), the Associated Press reports that there is little sense among Chinese internet users that the move represents such a huge change.
Most of the online services offered by Google are available in a government-approved substitute version, according to the AP report, with Baidu providing many of the same functions as Google and its subsidiaries.
The AP report asserts that "the generation of Chinese currently in their teens and 20s are known for their love of consumerism and disdain for politics." The cutoff of access to the popular World of Warcraft online role-playing-game was seen as a much bigger issue, and numerous workarounds were immediately put into place to enable Chinese gamers to play on Taiwanese servers.
Despite the country’s new openness of the past decade, analysts say that aspects of Chinese culture remain poorly understood in the West, not least among search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners.
