China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu

Taobao and Baidu finally started their battle in late 2008.

Alibaba group’s Taobao is well known as the number one C2C site with Alipay being the first choice online payment mechanism in China. However, Baidu entered the C2C competition by launching Youa with Baifubao as the payment mechanism.

    Baidu Youa C2C Site

Taobao Stops Baidu SEO, Baidu PPC

Taobao tries not to rely on Baidu SEO traffic. Taobao uses Robots.txt to block Baidu’s spider from indexing its millions of web pages. Take a look at the content of Taobao.com’s Robots.txt file:

User-agent: Baiduspider
Disallow: /

User-agent: baiduspider
Disallow: /

or access the file via your browser:

http://www.taobao.com/robots.txt

Run a site search on Baidu for Taobao.com and it returns only 2 results:

  • Taobao’s member sign-in page
  • Taobao’s B2C site: Taobao Mall Beta
    Taobao on Baidu Natural Search

Besides disappearing from Baidu’s natural search results, both Taobao and Alibaba stopped all advertising on Baidu PPC. Once both companies were on the list of biggest spenders of Baidu.

Earlier, Taobao merged with Alimama, and Koubei.com also merged with Yahoo China.

By launching Youa, Baidu lost the big PPC advertising revenue used to be generated from the Alibaba group. Baidu is also fighting an uphill battle to catch up with Taobao in China’s C2C market. The success may really depend on how well Baidu leverages from its large existing user base. Besides, Baidu also provides Chinese C2C users easy ways to import their products directly from Taobao to Youa.

For the Alibaba group, both Alibaba and Taobao are missing large search traffic volume that was used to be generated from Baidu. To make up the lost of traffic, the Alibaba group really has to work on improving Yahoo China in hoping this search engine will start gaining search market share in China.

Comments

2 Responses to “China C2C Battle Between Taobao and Baidu”

  1. Eric on December 8th, 2008 1:11 pm

    Very interesting post! It’s a pity baidu.com doesn’t have an english version. As European unfortunately you’re lost on the Chinese internet.

  2. Taobao FOCUS on June 25th, 2010 1:05 pm

    Baidu would better concentrate on their search business rather than going to online shopping stuff.

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