Analysis of Reasons for Baidu K-penalty and Measures to Save the Situation
Traffic is the hard truth that determines whether a website can survive. For small websites, most of their traffic comes from search engines. In China, the leading search engine is Baidu. Therefore, Baidu is the main source of traffic for small websites! To give your site traffic, Baidu must first index it. With indexing, there's a possibility of intermittent traffic, but to increase traffic, you need to rely on the search volume of keywords and your site's ranking.
We can say that most of our websites depend on Baidu for survival. But what if one day Baidu penalizes your site? Why does Baidu K-penalize your website? A few days ago, one of my sites, "Xue Xie Ji Ni Hua," was penalized by Baidu. The site had been operational for nearly a month with good indexing, and Baidu would visit daily to index new articles.
Once the site was penalized, the traffic plummeted sharply, from hundreds of IPs per day to just tens now. It’s heart-wrenching! Since I plan to continue running websites in the future, I will analyze several possible reasons for the penalty and also give everyone a reminder to avoid making the same mistakes!
Reason One: Having backlinks to penalized websites, thus getting indirectly penalized. After the site was penalized, I checked the links and was surprised to find 5-6 sites that were already penalized! This reason has been known for a long time, but I haven't checked the indexing status of these links for quite some time. Brothers, don't forget this point! Check your sites now.
Reason Two: Posting borderline content. Zhang Xiaoyu has been very popular recently. I posted an article which ranked well and brought good traffic. I posted another one, which was indexed but had average rankings. Then, I posted a third one, which wasn’t indexed at all. Perhaps this violates what Baidu refers to as “webpage content not conforming to national laws and regulations.”
Reason Three: Posting threads on Baidu Tieba (Baidu Forums). A few days ago, I posted a few threads on Tieba, including an article about "Princess Sister" that was deleted. The likelihood of being penalized due to this reason seems small because Tieba still drives some traffic to my site.
Reason Four: Keyword stuffing. This site is a free resource type site. Generally, articles won’t have keyword stuffing, but when updating articles found online, I usually make slight modifications. Maybe one of the articles went too far. This reason is possible but feels less significant.
Reason Five: Over-optimization. The site underwent a redesign in early October, with mostly free content on the homepage. The successful indexing over a month should not feel overly optimized. This reason seems less likely.
Reason Six: Too many domains pointing to the same site. I have several domains forwarding to the homepage of the new site. Some of these domains are still indexed by Baidu when searched using the Site function. For example, searching "ilovetea" finds one result.
Thinking about it, these seem to be the main reasons. Summarizing, there are three more likely reasons why a site gets penalized: 1) Being linked to penalized sites; 2) Content being borderline; 3) Too many domains pointing to the same site. The other three reasons, in relation to my site, feel less likely.
Generally speaking, once Baidu penalizes a site, it is almost impossible to get re-indexed. Cases like Tuwang getting re-indexed are rare. However, since I've been running this site for two years, I still have some experience. Also, other search engines still index my site decently, so I’ve taken some remedial actions and am hoping Baidu might reconsider re-indexing. My other site, "Xue Xie Chao Fu," after four redesigns, directly used a CMS program without changing the template, and it was re-indexed again.
Measures:
1. Remove backlinks to penalized sites;
2. Remove domain pointers to other domains;
3. Retain the content for now, considering removal later. Focusing on building a solid site may be better;
4. Consider starting a new site with a different theme.
This article is sourced from Xin Wang Zuan: http://www.xwangzhuan.cn/, Original URL: http://www.xwangzhuan.cn/cat_4/110.html