SEO in China may disappear with Google
You may already have read the news that Google are reviewing their operations in China due to some serious security breaches. Basically, Google have noticed that a number of human rights activists’ Gmail accounts have had attempted hack attacks from Chinese sources. This has caused Google to reassess their activities in China.
Chinese Google has always been censored, due to the legal situation with freedom of speech there. This is something that Google said they would always monitor:
“we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
It looks to me as though these security breaches have been the ‘final straw’ for Google. They were clearly always slightly uncomfortable with censoring their results in the first place, but now that their users personal emails have been accessed (even just the subject lines and dates is bad enough) they must feel extremely let down by the Chinese Government.
Google announced that they would no longer be censoring google.cn, this is something that they will be discussing with the Chinese Government. I have read reports that they have already ceased censoring google.cn already, but this is largely unsubstantiated.
So, what does this mean for SEO in China?
With Google being only the second most widely used search engine in China, it remains to be seen what effect this will have on SEO firms and their customers throughout China.
The main search engine in China is Baidu. Baidu is a totally different beast to Google, in that they will penalise any site that contains Chinese government forbidden keywords, adult content or pornography.
Chinese SEO will undoubtedly go on and will remain a growing industry there, but without Google – I can’t imagine optimising a site without thinking about Google.
