China Search Daily

265.com and Google is another hot keyword in my blog. “265.com Google” the keyword kept bringing my blog traffics for more than one year.

What’s amazing story between this two brands. Guess google china really learned a lot from china website like 265.com. I mean both the style and the domain strategy.

That’s why Google has it’s directory page in China, which looks wired for western internet user, and has a short domain www.g.cn.

Every international brand came across localization problems during they first steps in China. Google couldnt by pass all the problems over night or by technology.

Whether Google bought 265.com or not? It doesnt matter. When you look at www.265.com, the search box there will first bring you to google.

That tells everything.

Yes, I am talking about Gambling in China this month.

The town is full of dice sound day and night since two weeks ago. From hotel to department store, from grocery store to shopping mall, from school to home, People shouting, laughing, crying with the turn out of six dices.

This panic will continue during next two weeks.

So here comes the official gambling month, but only in Xiamen, Quanzhou, and some parts of southeast china.

This is the Mid-Autumn festival, people doing the gambling for moon cake. Every business get involved with that.

But what happen to search? I check the Moon Cake Gambling in Baidu and Google. No one buy the keyword on the paid listing, and no business site do the SEO for the organic listing.

Yeah, search need to be more marketing, so do the marketers.

Every year, hundreds of million cash flow during this gambling month in just a singe city. There must be some real business online, event the branding for moon cake company or bakery.

SES Xiamen closed at this May 26th, I noted this review but keep it for monthes. I thinked I shouldnt keep it that long, I would like to share my feeling and my thanks with my global search marketing friends.

The Thanks Giving Wall of Timev

Yes, at the top right, those chinese character stands for ” Thanks for all the partners that supported us during the past years”. And the left side are all the logos of those who were involved with Timev’s past events since year 2004.

The First Chinese SEO Championship Reward

I believed that we should make SES China a special one. We had been doing search marketing and related events since 2004, we should take the responsibility to create a stage for chinese SEOer. Duhugu was the right event to run. The Gentlemen in the middle was the champion of Duhugu, the first chinese SEO Championship. I was very glad to have Chris Sherman as the one to pass him the prize, a server and hosting service package worth USD12,000! Sponsor by Lanmang company. The beautiful lady at right end was the COO of Lanmang, the largest IDC in China. If you want to know her name and the company, better contact me for help.:)

The Keynote

Keynote to our Search Event was always challenging for me. To bring the search engine marketing theory to china couldnt be kicked off just over night. After the first SES China Keynote, both marketer’s and advertisers understood the value of search throught the Keynote presented by Jack Ma from Alibaba and Johnny Chou from Google China.
At Xiamen, Yvonne Chang, a smart and aggressive lady showed the audience how creative a search marketing can be. The Keynote between me, Chris Sherman and Yvonne Chang told a story about search marketing developement and China Yahoo. For sure we touched something about the Panama.

The Active Audience: 1200+

WOW, I never imaged a crowd like this before the event. 1200+ audiences really made the event a GREAT one at Xiamen. Delegates came from all over china, covering multi-industries.
I was thinking that, there must be a day we can post all the audience’s pictures at the Thanks Giving Wall.

Good Bye Dinner

Hi Jianfei, I must give you this Big Hug, I think I should give Matt Cutts one in the future. Your participate to SES Xiamen really showed us that Matt Cutts and his google team really care about chinese marketers and advertisers.

Bill Hunt, Ian McArin and the SES China team

Marshall Simonds and SES China Team

Rand Fishkin and SES China Team

Farah, Inway, RQ, Shari and Peter Zarf

That was always hard to say good bye. But every event needs a good-bye dinner!
Let Ganbei ( Cheers in Chinese ) !

Here came the SES China Ganbei SEVEN ( Jon Qiu, Chris Sherman, Tim Walsh, Eric Yao, RQ Zeng, Inway Ni, Stone Chen)

See you all at next show!

Who is 265.com?

I have posted about 265.com and its founder Mr. Cai before.

265.com is regarded as a grass-root legend in china internet market. They maybe the simplest site in China. I said they were the teenage yahoo, like a directory or navigation site.

A similar website called hao123.com had already merged by Baidu two year ago. After that, IDG VC invested into 265.com, Google followed the coming year.

Both hao123.com and 265.com had contribute huge traffic for both Baidu and Google for since 2004. The most valuabale asset for these website are traffice and massive amount of faithful internet users. A hugh amount of chinese internet user make 265.com as their homepage at the computers.

Now, a little bird told me today,Google extend its investment and merge 265.com into its china branch. No one commeted about that so far.

Are you ready?
If you happen to know chinese and know something about SEO, and pretend to be very creative, you should never miss this chinese SEO contest.

Where to go?
Duhugu. They have a chinese name for that, three chinese characteristic, first first one’s chinese pinyin is “du”, second “hu”, and third “gu”. “duhugu” Which means a valley where tiger always pass the river. Yes go to this valley and apply for the contest.

How to contest?
Duhugu. Yes, although the name have interesting chinese meaning, but actually none of the search engines even index a single page about this keyword. It’s clean and clear from the very beginning. What you need to do is optimizing your page targeting “duhugu” in chinese. There is a very important thing for this contest, be creative for your content and respect to all copyright issues.

How long will this contest lasts?
You can continue enhancing your performance before next year’ SES Xiamen. Which means the contest starts from now and will end at may, 2007.

Any interesting stories?
Sure, most of the people believed that “du” is baidu, “hu” is Yahoo, “gu” is google. “duhugu” stands for the “big three” in chinese. Well, maybe ture, Yahoo’s chinese name in pinyin is “yahu“, Google’s chinese name in pinyin is “guge”, and baidu is “baidu“. Yes, why not, and name with a story and can stands for three search engine.

How about the performance so far?
If you index the “duhugu” in chinese at all the above search engines, hundreds of thousands pages are already there, but before the contest, that was 1 weeks ago, nothing!! Yes, many SEO fans had already taken part in this contest.

If you know some chinese and know SEO, come and join it now.

Google anounced its 19th china reseller, Hangzhou Gototime, at today.

Let’s review the first step of google china reseller project:

Google signs up first AdWords partner in China

SHANGHAI, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) has agreed to sell its popular AdWords advertisements in China through a local firm, in the first such deal for the global search leader since winning a China business license.

Under their agreement, China Enterprise, a provider of IT services and a subsidiary of Hong Kong-listed Sino-i Technology Ltd. (0250.HK: Quote, Profile, Research), has been authorised to sell the Google AdWords service — used in markets around the world — in China.

Sino-i Technology shares were up 6.47 percent at HK$0.148 on Monday, after rising as much as 11 percent.

“By aligning with CE, with its leading position in China’s e-commerce and (small and medium enterprise) market and large customer base, Google can now provide… businesses in China with easy access to Google AdWords,” the companies said in a joint statement.

 

AdWords allows advertisers to pay to have their ads appear on a results page when an Internet user searches for particular words on Google.

 

The partnership is the first to be announced by Google since it received a business license earlier this year to operate in China, the world’s second-largest Internet market with more than 100 million users.

Google is in the process of formulating its China strategy, including expanding staffing for an eventual permanent office and staff in the country despite its relatively late arrival.

Rival Yahoo Inc. (YHOO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) made its big move into China in 2003, with the $120 million purchase of a popular local search site, 3721.com.

Google already owns a 2.6 percent stake in leading Chinese search engine Baidu.com (BIDU.O: Quote, Profile, Research), whose shares more than quadrupled on their debut after the Beijing-based firm’s IPO last week — the best debut on the Nasdaq since the dot-com era.

Google is believed to have tried to increase its stake in Baidu prior to the IPO, but was rebuffed by the Chinese company.

California-based Google is now trying to formulate its next step in China, deciding on whether to wait for a new chance to boost its stake in Baidu or to forge ahead in a market where it already enjoys strong brand recognition despite its late arrival.

12 months, 19 players, looks like a very good performance report. But if you look at the market share report, Google China didnt had significant improvement compared with 12 months ago. Baidu and Yahoo china still in front of Google China, although the real name business at Yahoo China was suffering a thrinking .

Are all those resellers Mr Right for google Adwords? Are they using ROI-oriented strategies to serve their client? What kind of marketing strategies they are using? Did they competed with each other? What’s the percentage of advertisers complaints?

The most important question is, how Google China will evaluate it performance for the past 12 months with strong figures at revenue.

Yes the most powerful answer is always the numbers. That can be exciting, or embarrassing.

19 players, who will out and who will be the 20th?

Who Care!!

Google anounced its 10th official reseller in China, fj53.com. As the name indicated, fj53 will mostly serve the Fujian province.

Google china is gradualy narrowing down resellers’ serving area. From the very beginning, its first two resellers could play as a national reseller to cover all over china. Later, new resellers are onle be official in specific area. Now the 10th is more specific than before, will mostly serving a specific province.

One more reseller, and there will be 11, enough to be a football team.

China search engine market is another World Cup, or China Cup, the google China team’s performance depends on the reseller recruitment and training strategies. Sure the coach is very important too.

But it seems the coach’s voice now are not very strong. Hardly can we find any single news about him recently.

The search engine china cup is ready. How about the google china team? Be dream Brazil team, or champion Italian team?

From the midnight of June 23th, to the afternoon of 24th, beijing time, Google’s .cn domain and MSN’s .cn domain were hijacked for hours.

All the visits to www.google.cn were redirected to a chinese B2B site, which was owned by a .cn domain registrar. The same happened to MSN and 4 other global brands.

At the year of 2002. Google.com was once hijacked and redirected to Baidu in China.

Yes, there were several defferent Anti- Unions at recent two years. Anti-Baidu union or Anti-Google Union.

I would like to say that was just another PR show.

The one who launched this union was an 3721 reseller, they dont have any official relationship with google. Sure, they aren’t google resellers. Although they did do some web related business together with 3721 real name search business, they seldom suggestted google adwords to their clients. Yes, they dont have any direct reason to fight google.

The union was a show, I came accross some of the resellers on the list of the union. None of them said they did jion the union. All of them claimed privately to me that they never jion the union.

Some of them were very angried, they said that they partner reseller invited them to a new product luanching event. They just simply replied an “yes” but never go there. Finally the launching event became an anouncement for Anti-google Union. And their companies’ name were on top of the list.

One more thing, none of the members on the list is google reseller.

This was really just a PR show. Someone wanted to make his own reputation by playing a trick to Google or other leading brand in this market.

Baidu bought hao123.com at Sep 2004, with 50 million RMB ( about 6 million USD ) and some stocks of Baidu. That was really a big deal at that year. And the story of hao123.com and its founder Mr Li Xingping became a legend.

IDGVC invested about 20 million RMB ( about 2.5 million USD ) to 265.com at the end of 2004. And Goolge followed up and invested +10 million to 265.com at the beginning of 2006. 265.com and its founder Mr Cai Wensheng was another legend.

Both hao123 and 265 are very simple and common-looks site, initiated by their only founder. Yes, Mr Lixingping did everything related to hao123.com almost by himself. So did Mr Cai Wensheng and his 265.com.

Their Alexa traffic ranking are all among the top 100 at the year of 2004.

They are not portal or search engine. They look as simple as just only one page. We call 265.com and hao123.com as sites navigation site, or url navigation site.

They simply list all the popular site’s name with live link at just one page. But most of the internet users make them as their home page.

Why? Because it’s hard for those Chinese users to remember the urls with English characters. For them, to remember the url and type it at the browser are very challenging to them.

But they know Chinese, so one page with a directory for site name in Chinese and with live link is very convenient to them.

265 and hao123 did try very hard to modify and update their directory, and to make more clear and user-friendly categories.

Because their user friendly, they both occupied the largest share in Chinese home page market. And they brought remarkable traffics to portals and search engines. I believed that ,3 years ago, still a lager percentage of Chinese internet users got to know sites like google from them.

Traffic and user royalty are their core value. They benefited from the sort of adsense from baidu and other searh engines in china since 2003/2004. Which meant they started to turn out cash from their traffics.

Hao123 started from 1999, and 265 started from 2003. Mr Li is pretty young and Mr Cai is still at his 30s now.

Mr Li is enjoying his life Guangdong province. After baidu’s deal with hao123, Mr Cai and his 265.com grew up very fast, now became the leader and hero in Chinese internet industry, especially for those so-called independent webmasters. Thousands of creative small sites and their webmasters/founders were well-connected by MR Cai and his 265.com. He is a “traffic driver” and a “traffic broker”, because he had developed an traffic exchange center (TEC) at his 265.com. At 2004 and 2005, every of the Chinese search engines, B2Bs and B2Cs benefit a lot from this TEC.

At 2005 and 2006, the 1st and 2nd Chinese webmaster conferences were launched by Mr Cai and his partner.

More legends are coming soon.