Why isn't my website showing on Baidu?

“Not showing” can mean four different problems, and each one has a different fix. Many guides skip that step and hand you a list of causes to try at random.

Baidu has published more on this than those lists suggest, though much of it is old and only in Chinese.

This guide works through those documents, as part of our overview of Baidu SEO. Each one is dated, so you can judge what still holds.

First, which kind of “not showing” do you have?

Run two searches on baidu.com, then compare them with your logs. A site:yourdomain.com search and a search for one page’s exact title will place you in the table below.

Treat site: as a rough sign only. Baidu calls the figure an estimate.⁶ Our guide on checking indexed pages covers the method in detail.

What you see	Stage that failed	Go to
No Baiduspider in your logs	Access or discovery	Is Baidu reaching your site?
Baiduspider gets errors or odd redirects	Access	What can block the crawler
Baiduspider gets 200, nothing is listed	Filtered before the index	Crawled but not indexed
Listed, but only the title matches	Partial indexing	Crawled but not indexed
Listed for your brand, absent for what you sell	Ranking	Indexed but nowhere to be seen
You were listed, then you disappeared	Lost	When a site vanishes

1. Reachable

   Baiduspider can connect.

2. Crawled

   It receives the real page with a 200.

3. Indexed

   The page passes the pre-indexing filter.

4. Ranked

   It shows up for a real query.

The stages are separate. A forum team in 2019 logged dozens of daily Baidu requests returning 200, yet site: showed none of its topic pages.²⁰ The thread never confirmed a cause.

Is Baidu reaching your site?

Your server logs answer this, and they don’t need a Baidu account. Until you’ve read them, every other cause is a guess.

1. Search your access logs. Look for baiduspider, case-insensitive, across as many weeks as your host keeps.
2. Confirm it’s really Baidu. Run a reverse DNS lookup on the IP. Genuine hostnames end in .baidu.com or .baidu.jp.⁵
3. Group the hits by status code. Look for 403, 404, 5XX and redirects, and note which URLs they hit.
4. Check your CDN or firewall logs too. A request stopped at the edge never reaches your server, so your server logs won’t show it.
5. Test for a user-agent rule. Compare curl -I https://yoursite.com/ with curl -I -A "Baiduspider/2.0" https://yoursite.com/. A difference points to a rule. No difference doesn’t clear IP rules.

No genuine Baiduspider at all? Baidu hasn’t found you, or something stops it before your server.

Baidu discovers new URLs by following links from seed pages,¹ so a site with no links pointing to it gives the spider little to follow.

Submission is the other route. Baidu says it shortens discovery and doesn’t guarantee indexing.¹⁵ See how to submit your site.

What can block the crawler without you knowing?

A block can be a side effect of a setting made for another reason. Baidu’s documents name each type, and the table below follows its terms.

Baidu’s term	What it means	What to check
DNS anomaly	Spider can’t resolve your IP, or your registrar blocks it 12	Resolved IP and DNS provider settings
Connection timeout	Connection times out from overload or an unstable network 2	Server load during crawl hits
Crawl timeout	Connected, but the page downloads too slowly 2	Page weight and bandwidth
Carrier anomaly	Spider can’t reach you through China Telecom or Unicom 1	Test from both carriers
IP ban	Firewall or host blocks the spider’s IPs 1	Firewall, host and bot-protection rules
UA ban	Server returns 403, 500 or a redirect for that user agent 1	Step 5 above
robots.txt	Your file blocks the page 3	Baiduspider rules in robots.txt
Abnormal redirect	Sends a dead page to the homepage or a parent folder, or sends the spider to an error page 1	Language and country redirects
Access denied	Page needs a login, or the server refuses the spider 3	Login walls and security plugins

Baidu’s August 2020 manual reports 8 types: DNS, connection timeout, crawl timeout and connection error, then 403, 404, 5XX and other 4XX.² The carrier, IP and UA terms come from its 2014 guide.¹

Country rules deserve a second look

Foreign sites have a specific risk here. Some owners challenge or block Chinese traffic because of abusive bots.

Our concern here is an inference. A crawler is unlikely to pass an interactive challenge, and Baidu’s 2019 guide refers to spider IPs from abroad, Shandong and Beijing.⁴

So a country rule could catch it. We couldn’t confirm how bot-protection lists treat Baiduspider.

Baidu also warns against serving different data by spider location, which it says can cause abnormal spider behavior or status returns.⁴ By our reading, country redirects and geo-targeted pages could fall under that warning.

If you allow the spider and it still fails, your site may be unreachable from China in general. Check whether it’s accessible, and whether it’s blocked or just slow.

Crawl failures also cost you beyond the page concerned. Baidu says a site with a lot of uncrawlable content may be rated lower, with effects on crawling, indexing and ranking.²⁶

Crawled but not indexed: why pages get filtered

This is the stage most guides we read miss. Baidu wrote in its 2014 guide that most websites aren’t indexed, and that the reason is filtering before indexing, not failure to find them.¹

“并非是百度没有发现他们，而是在建库前的筛选环节被过滤掉了”: Baidu didn’t fail to find them, they were filtered out before indexing.¹

The text is old, but it fits Baidu’s December 2020 list of what it won’t admit: cheating, low-quality and costly-to-access content.²⁷

Filter, 2014 guide 1	What it covers	What to check on your page
Duplicate content	Content already online	Text copied from your other sites, partners or resellers
Empty or thin main content	Includes JavaScript content Baidu can’t parse, and very slow pages	What the spider actually receives
Some cheating pages	Pages that break its rules	Auto-generated pages, keyword stuffing

Baidu’s 2021 Q&A starts in the same place. It tells owners to ask whether their content is high quality, has value, and heavily duplicates other resources.⁷

Its August 2023 list is the most recent detail we found. It names poor or irrelevant content, empty pages, dead links and poor titles, plus experience problems such as bad ads and slow loading.¹²

Check what the spider really receives

A page that looks full in your browser can be empty to Baidu. If you can’t use Baidu’s tool, view the raw HTML source and search it for a sentence from your main text.

• JavaScript: Baidu’s 2017 white paper says H5 pages loaded by JS are more likely to come out thin.⁸ See does Baidu read JavaScript?
• Page size: The same paper says source code usually shouldn’t exceed 128k. One 164k page lost its main content in the crawl, was judged empty and wasn’t indexed.⁸
• Crawl frequency: Baidu says crawl frequency “indirectly determines” how many pages may enter the index.¹ Update frequency, quality, connectivity and site rating all feed it.¹

Those size limits are old, so read them as a warning sign, not a current threshold.

Partial indexing is a real state

Being listed doesn’t mean Baidu has read the page. Silas Brown suspected a title-only match in July 2018, and his site matched body text only on December 28, 2018.¹⁹

It’s one site, not a norm, but it shows why you should test a body sentence as well as a title.

Could the foreign server be the cause?

It might be, but nobody can show you how much. Baidu’s notice of October 12, 2017 warns of display problems for Chinese-language sites on overseas servers, with no cause or scope.⁹

A note from the same day advises against overseas servers for Chinese-language sites and gives no reason.¹⁰ We found no later text and no published data measuring the effect.

So check everything above first, since those causes can be seen and fixed. Our guide on whether Baidu indexes foreign websites sets out the evidence.

If your site is only in English, that’s a separate question. See whether Baidu indexes websites in English.

Free check

Is your website visible on Baidu?

Enter your website. We check Baidu, access from China and how your site is set up, then email you the report.

Your websiteCheck my site

Indexed, but nowhere to be seen

If a brand search finds you and a product search doesn’t, indexing has done its job. This is a ranking problem, and four explanations fit.

• Low-tier index: Baidu splits its index into tiers, and says pages in the lower one have little chance of being shown.⁶
• Competition from Baidu: Ryte’s 2022 study of 5 sectors reports Baidu’s own products always appearing in the top 3, top 10 and top 30.²⁴ See Baike, Tieba and Baidu’s own results.
• Sensitive searches: Citizen Lab reported in 2023 that softly censored queries generally show only Chinese government sites and state-aligned media.¹⁸ See sensitive content, and ask a local adviser.
• A penalty: Baidu’s sanctions for link and click cheating include limited display, and permanent bans in serious cases.¹³

Don’t jump to the last one. Baidu said in 2015 that when it looks into traffic complaints, most of those sites weren’t really penalized, or not for anything they’d done on purpose.¹⁴ That’s Baidu’s own account, from a document last updated in 2015.

For the ranking work itself, see how to rank on Baidu from outside China.

When a site vanishes after being listed

Start with what changed around that date. Baidu’s documents and one public case point to outages, moved infrastructure and security problems.

Possible cause	What the evidence says
Outage	Baidu’s 2019 guide says a day without access may do “catastrophic” damage 4
Site-wide 404s	Baidu says a 404 removes the page from results 4. After about 120 hours of 404s in June 2019, Brown’s homepage was delisted by the 24th and back by the 28th. He states no cause 19
Long-running 503	Fine for a pause, but pages that stay on 503 are removed as dead links 4
CDN changed IPs	Baidu said in 2015 that the spider sees a problem, cuts its crawling, then weighs dropping unreachable pages 14
robots.txt change	Baidu’s 2015 document says to test it with its robots tool 14. Its FAQ says a change usually takes 48 hours 5
Hacked pages	Crawl diagnosis can reveal hidden links or text you didn’t add 3

Check the numbers as well before you panic. Baidu’s August 2020 manual says a 10% swing in index volume, or more, can be normal.⁶

Which claims should you ignore?

Most checklists mix real causes with unproven ones. Here’s how some claims and assumptions hold up against what we read.

Claim	What we found
“No ICP is why you’re missing”	Marketing to China lists it first.21 We found no Baidu text making it a condition. See ranking without an ICP
“New sites wait 1 to 3 months”	Naibabiji says so, without a source.22 Baidu gives no number, only “a cycle”.7 See how long Baidu takes
“Missing meta keywords hold you back”	Marketing to China calls it a secondary signal, not a primary factor.21 The only Baidu text we found on the tag covers mini programs.28 Don’t expect it to fix indexing
“Server-side rendering adds 40% to 60% more indexed pages within 60 days”	Marketing to China credits unnamed brands.21 We couldn’t check it
“Losing verification hurts your rankings”	Baidu’s 2023 notice says the removal doesn’t affect discovery, display or ranking 11
“Submitting again will fix it”	Baidu says submission can’t settle whether content gets indexed 15

What to do, in order

Work from access to ranking, because each stage depends on the one before. You can do the first four steps without an account.

1. Read your logs, and confirm real Baiduspider visits.
2. Remove accidental blocks in your CDN, firewall, bot protection and robots.txt.
3. Check the raw HTML of your key pages for your main text.
4. Test access from mainland China, on more than one network.
5. Get a Baidu account if you can. Its crawl and index tools sit behind a verified site, and a mainland number is the route Baidu’s help describes without reservation.¹⁷ See the phone number problem.
6. Submit your Chinese pages, then watch your logs for the visits.
7. Improve what was filtered, starting with thin and duplicate pages.
8. Earn links from relevant sites, because Baidu finds new pages by following links.¹ See backlinks for Baidu.
9. Use the feedback center if you suspect an algorithm hit and find no rule broken. Baidu’s Q&A points owners there.⁷

Change one thing at a time and keep dated notes. Baidu gives no timeline for indexing,⁷ so you need notes to tell cause from coincidence.

There’s a limit to all this. Baidu’s crawl documents are years old, and we haven’t run these checks in a live account. Some sites may do everything right and still stay out.

The bottom line

Don’t ask why Baidu ignores your site. Find the stage where it stops: reachable, crawled, indexed or ranked.

Your logs show the first two. After that, Baidu itself points first to the content: thin, duplicated or unreadable pages. Fix what you can see before you buy an explanation.

How Index in China can help

We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, handle its submission to Chinese search engines where the account allows it and send a monthly report on Chinese traffic.

We commit to a set number of indexed pages and to reporting, not to traffic. We’ll tell you when your case needs a local adviser.

You can see what we do or book a 30-minute call.

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