How the trust and authority factors influence Chinese search engine Baidu’s page and ad rank
In the simple ad placement model VCG introduced in class, advertisers with high value per click will bid on a high price, because of which they can get the best ad slots. However, in the real world, for the Chinese search engine Baidu at least, willing to pay high is not enough for getting a favored ad slot. An advertiser will also need to achieve a high Quality Score according to Baidu’s standard—in short, be trustworthy and compliant. First, trust. This is similar to the page rank model talked about in class. If page A is linked by many webpages, especially by those popular ones, the trust score of page A would increase. In another sense, when a trusted webpage links to page A, it also passes its trust to page A. Second, compliance. More specially, if a webpage follows the China Advertising Law (2015), it will score high for this category. Besides widely referenced rules such as being careful to use superlative adjectives and others’ trademark terms, sensitive political words must also be avoided. Once an advertiser’s performance on trust, compliance, and many other minor factors are evaluated, Baidu will assign a Quality Score to the advertiser with V3 being the best and V1 being the worst, which shows below each ad on the search page (see the circled elements in the below picture). When an advertiser has both a high bid and a promising Quality Score, it will possibly win a good ad slot.
Picture source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/baidu-serp-features-ranking-signals-guide/257081/#close
Besides ads, how does authority affect any page’s rank on Baidu? There are both direct and indirect influences. For direct impact, since the primary (~93%) audience of Baidu are either Chinese or people living in China, the search engine factors how well a webpage targets this audience into its page rank algorithm. Naturally, local Chinese hosting is a strong signal that a webpage does target Chinese people. Local hosts many times are better at following the rules, and they get higher ranks, so do pages they link to or link to them, which normally are also those following the rule and local. Therefore, it creates a positive feedback loop that in time, local, compliant pages likely occupy those high-ranked search result spots. Additionally, there exists indirect impacts of authority. Local, rule-following webpages normally are more compatible to the Chinese firewall due to their nature. Those incompatible can have serious issues with latency on Baidu. People tend to visit slow-loading pages less, and web browsers like to filter them out. Therefore, authority and trust are important factors to page rank on Baidu.
Other source: https://www.jadegital.com/baidu-ppc-quality-score-how-it-works-and-tips-to-improve-it/