Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Baidu is China’s leading search engine; for the Chinese, it is what Google is for us. It is much more than a search engine; it is more of a portal for the online users to find all that they need in one place. However, Baidu is facing problems recently owning to the scandals associated with it. The stock values of Baidu have dropped drastically. The major revenue for the company was through the advertisements. This too has dropped severely.

Baidu has allegedly given high rankings for unlicensed medical personnel who sold fake medicines that did not work at exorbitant prices. Baidu, which is listed in NASDAQ, was blamed in a television show in China for allowing the dubious services to pay for top positions. Baidu has an advertising program called pay for performance or P4P. Under this program if you paid more you will be given prominent positions in this top search engines. However, Baidu should have checked the documents carefully for before it advertised these services. After this incident, Baidu received severe criticism from the public this also made Baidu’s stock plummet at unprecedented levels.

People who went by the search engines listing to these fake medical practitioners were talked into buying expensive medicine, which apparently did not work. Baidu CEO Robin Li promised to take severe action against those employees who were involved in the scandal. According to his statement to the media, “Baidu employees who are found to have been involved in the scandal will be penalised … We have already fired people who helped fabricate documents for unlicensed suppliers.

“We have removed the key words of all four clients mentioned in the report and have begun to double-check the licenses of all other hospitals and pharmacies on our client list.”

However, the question is will Baidu be solely responsible for this mistake. It should not be the responsibility of Baidu to verify the documents and for that matter, any search engine for advertising products and services in their search engines. No other search engine is currently validating the documents of medical practitioners or other service providers. If it has to do that, with the current volume of advertising that is happening online, search engines will be involved fulltime in validating documents and not on other core functions of their business.
Baidu has however promised to revalidate the documents of all the other medical service providers who are advertising their services and products through Baidu. If the situation should continue, Google, which has been trailing Baidu in the competition, is more likely to take the lead. Baidu currently owns 60% of the Chinese market and its popularity was increasing day by day before the scandal. Now people would think twice to click on a result and to trust what is said their. It will also bring down the traffic to the search engine. According to the reports, one of the unlicensed clinics offered Baidu 16.56 per click for the top listing of their services.