Hao123 officially explained the meaning of the new logo:

• The green leaf represents dedication and growth.
• The orange “hao” means passion and quality.
• The green “123″ represents the Internet journal Hao123 has gone through in the past years.

Hao123′s old logo used to look like:

Hao123 as Baidu’s Business

Hao123.com’s business model is based on ad sales, i.e. Many text links (but not all text links) on Hao123 are for sale, especially most text links on Hao123′s homepage that point to other Chinese websites could cost a fortune.

Hao123 may even be already generating 6%-7% of Baidu’s total revenues, making it one of the major Baidu revenue contributors.

Hao123.com Improvements

To improve users’ experience on finding Chinese websites without Chinese search engines, Hao123 has made incremental site layout updates which can be found on older versions of Hao123.com’s homepages over several years.

Hao123 has also recently made improvements to the left side navigation:

Hao123.com homepage’s current appearance:

Let’s look at how Hao123.com’s homepage has changed over the years.

2002′s www.Hao123.com

2003′s www.Hao123.com

2004′s www.Hao123.com

2005′s www.Hao123.com

2006′s www.Hao123.com

2007′s www.Hao123.com

2008′s www.Hao123.com

The archived images of Hao123.com’s homepages can be found on Internet Archive (the way-back machine).

What is Hao123.com?

Hao123.com was launched in 1999 and was acquired by Chinese search engine Baidu.com in 2004.

For Chinese internet users, Hao123 is an Internet “start page” that shows paid and non-paid links on the home page and category pages. Hao123′s homepage consists of over 200 outbound links that are pointing to other popular Chinese websites. Categorized pages consist of outbound links to websites with specific topics including:

• Weather: www.hao123.com/tianqi.htm
• Maps: www.hao123.com/jiatong.htm
• Shopping: www.hao123.com/netbuy.htm
• Stock market: www.hao123.com/stock.htm
• Properties: www.hao123.com/hbzs.htm
• Automobiles: www.hao123.com/car.htm
• Health: www.hao123.com/ylbj.htm
• Jobs: www.hao123.com/rencai.htm
• Travel: www.hao123.com/liyou.htm

My Hao123 Personalized Page

To improve users’ experience, Hao123.com offers this “wide screen” version of the directory site and personalized homepage, My Hao123 which is similar to iGoogle. To use My Hao123, sign up for a Baidu login. You can select your background image and add up to 10 customized URLs which will appear on your personal My Hao123 page:

Submit Sites to Hao123.com

An alternative to advertising on Baidu through Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest is to submit your sites to Hao123′s directory listings.

Baidu has an editorial team ensuring the listing quality and managing site submissions to Hao123.com, so depending on the quality and popularity of your sites in China, you websites may or may not be included.

Inclusion may be difficult for Chinese sites that do not already have high traffic volume or are not yet big brand names. Alternatively, submit your site to Baidu to receive organic search engine traffic.

Hao123′s Legitimacy

Hao123 is one of Baidu’s largest search traffic providers and has the highest web traffic among all the Chinese web directory sites. This caused Chinese webmasters to create fake Hao123 sites, including:

www.hao123.cn
www.hao123.com.cn
www.hao123.net.cn
www.hao123.cc

However, Baidu officially announced that besides www.hao123.com, below are also legitimate Hao123 domains:

www.hao123.net
www.hao222.com
www.hao222.net