If you are thinking of creating a Chinese language website and having it rank for certain terms on Chinese search engines such as Baidu and Google.cn, you’ve probably also wondered how Chinese link building is done or how it differs from English link building. The basics are the same, but the practice is different. 

To be specific, this is what is the same for both English and Chinese link building:

-Links should be linking from a relevant page on a similar topic to the page being linked to.
-Anchor test should be the words or a variant of the words that you are optimizing for.

The actual work of getting links can be quite a bit different. Most importantly, if you are running a Chinese link building campaign for SEO purposes it would be wise to target Baidu as Baidu has over twice as many Chinese users as Google does. Baidu tends to put more emphasis on the quantity of links and less emphasis on the quality of links. Baidu also tends to be used more for entertainment while Google is used for research. However, Google’s users tend to be younger and have higher incomes. Professional Chinese SEO companies will generally take the strategy of targeting Baidu or targeting Baidu and Google, but they rarely specifically target Google.

Here are some tips on general Chinese link building strategies:

-Forums are hugely popular in China and moderators generally go easier on posters that post links to their websites. This makes forums a good source for both traffic and SEO.
-Article distribution websites are not very useful and not plentiful because the content would simply be stolen by other websites with no link given in return.
-Providing high quality content or a useful tool as link bait is still a good strategy. However, content copying is abundant so you should make your site uncopyable in some way.
-Micro-blogs are now becoming common but are nowhere nearly as influential as Twitter is for English website.
-There are plenty of Chinese social bookmarking websites that provide a relatively easy way of building up links.
-Commenting on Chinese blogs is similar to commenting on English blogs. It’s up to the blog moderator whether or not they keep the comment.
-Social media is huge in China and growing quite quickly. Especially for websites with rich content, it would be advisable to run link building campaigns on some of the local social networking websites.

If you understand English link building, you already know the fundamentals that are applicable to Chinese link building. However, even if you can already read Chinese, the actual practice of Chinese link building could be done much more effectively by people with specific experience in this area. If you do choose to do the Chinese link building on your own, be prepared to spend your time in the trenches learning what works and what doesn’t.