As most China users will know, there is no official agency that “blocks” websites. In fact, most of the time, the government states that sites are not blocked, despite fairly obvious proof to the contrary.

China typically asserts that “connection resets” to sites like Facebook and Youtube are just network issues, despite those network issues solely appearing at the ip addresses associated with the government firewalls at the gateway routers to overseas.

Here in the UAE (Dubai), the government still blocks, but at least they’re upfront about it:
See below for an example of a blocked site

Why is this important?

Transparency is a big problem for western entities doing business in China. As with the recent Google PR stunt/debacle, most companies have no real mechanism for dealing with arbitrary judgements for / against things that affect their business.

A clear and transparent mechanism for dealing with why sites are blocked, coupled with a delisting mechanism would be a good place to start. It would also help to defuse the detractors against censorship – although most countries censor, China is one of the usual scapegoats picked on.

Maybe if China implemented a what (was blocked) / why (it was blocked) / how (to get unblocked) system, detractors would have less to complain about.

Lawrence.

The usual common sense ones apply -

• Making sure Page Titles are clear.
  Don’t forget to add relevant page descriptions to each page.
• Making sure that content is relevant.
  Lack of content is the number one issue most clients have.  They want to score highly in search engines, but they don’t have any relevant content.  This one is easy to solve, although it takes some time. Identify keywords that you want to be found by, and create content that includes those words.

  I also advise clients to take a look at their competition, and see who scores highly for the words that they want to be found under.

  Analyse the competition, or high ranking sites and see why they score highly.  This is the one thing that will improve your search relevance dramatically.

• Making sure Page names and navigation folders are human friendly
  eg – on our Computer Solutions site, we have file/folder names like:
  http://www.computersolutions.cn/en/Support/Mail Settings.html

  These are both search engine and human friendly.

  Bad Examples of this are things like:

  http://www.somebadexample.com/index.php?id=1&section=2

• Add SiteMaps for search Engines, and submit those to the Search Engineseg – on all our Sites we have a /sitemap.xml which lists all the pages in the sites, as well as dates on which they were last updated.  The CMS software we use makes these automatically everytime a page is updated.

• Using Flash in moderation, and making sure that site navigation is available via standard links if navigation is via a flash component.Flash sites are generally not indexable by the major search engines.
  Flash sites also take interminably long times to load.  They look cool, but potential clients aren’t necessarily interested in waiting for them to load.
• Don’t go too far
  Quite a lot of SEO is bleeding edge, and short term.  It may get you high rankings for a while, but in the long term if you use shortcuts to gip the system, you’ll get burned (and your SEO ranking will drop).

While all the sites we create are pretty SEO friendly (and follow my general guidelines above), its good to have advice to give to clients, and potential clients.

While I’ve outlined the basics above, Google has made a free PDF file which talks about this in more detail, with things I mentioned above, as well as a few more that you may not know about.

Click here to download the Google SEO PDF