Getting your new site indexed by Baidu

Two separate problems: reachable, then kept

Whether Baiduspider can reach you is a technical problem. Whether it keeps you is a content and authority problem. Most sites that complain “Baidu will not index me” are stuck on the first one — which is why steps one to four below are entirely about being reachable.

We walked this exact sequence on our own site, including the trap, so this is not a copied checklist.

Step 1 · Get three things onto your site (prompts 1, 2, 3)

Before touching the Baidu console, make the site itself ready. All three can be generated — no hand-written code.

Add a robots.txt to my site: allow crawling of public pages (home, listing pages, articles, about, contact), block the paths that should never be indexed (admin, login, payment callbacks, APIs), and point to the sitemap.xml address inside the file.

Generate sitemap.xml listing every public URL (home, section pages, each piece of content, policy pages). Do not include anything that requires signing in.

Check the title and description of every page and rewrite them as plain sentences saying what the page is about — no defaults like “Untitled page”.

Step 2 · Verify the site in Baidu Search Resource Platform

The flow is fixed: open ziyuan.baidu.com -> user centre -> site management -> add site -> enter the full https address -> choose file verification -> download the HTML file it gives you -> put it in the site root -> click verify.

Three details matter: do not rename the file (it looks like baidu_verify_codeva-xxxx.html); the code inside the file is a different string from the one in the filename, and neither should be edited; and do not delete the file after verification — Baidu explicitly requires it to stay.

If verification keeps failing, open that URL in a browser yourself: it must display the code. Landing on a login page, a 404, or a redirect all count as failure.

Step 3 · Submit the sitemap (this is the trap we hit) (prompt 4)

In the console, open Common inclusion -> sitemap and submit your sitemap URL. The trap: Baidu checks whether the URLs inside the sitemap belong to the exact site domain you verified.

In our case the site was verified on the www domain, while the sitemap listed bare-domain URLs — submitting it did absolutely nothing. No error, no feedback, just silence. It only passed once the sitemap was generated to follow the requesting host.

Two fixes, either is fine: add and verify both the bare domain and www, submitting each sitemap under its own property, or make the sitemap host-aware. The second is a one-off fix; the prompt is below.

Change sitemap generation to follow the host being requested: when visited on the www domain, list www URLs; on the bare domain, list bare-domain URLs. Apply the same rule to the sitemap line in robots.txt.

Step 4 · Auto-push is more active than a sitemap (prompt 5)

A sitemap says “come and crawl me”; auto-push says “every visitor just handed you this URL”. Baidu's console gives you a small JS snippet under Common inclusion -> auto-push. Add it to every page — no token, no extra account.

For a new site this often beats the sitemap, because every visit becomes a submission.

Add Baidu's auto-push script to every page of the site (home, listings, articles) and confirm it loads on each of them.

Step 5 · Manual submission (small quota, spend it well)

Daily manual submission quotas are small for a new site — commonly around ten a day — so do not waste them: home page first, then section pages, then the handful of articles you most want ranking, and finally the about and contact pages.

The quota resets daily; the rest can go in tomorrow.

Step 6 · Confirm Baidu can actually reach you (prompt 6)

The crawl diagnostics tool in the console is the most direct: give it a URL and it fetches as Baiduspider, showing you the status and what it received.

Without console access you can test it yourself by pretending to be the crawler — the key is switching the User-Agent to Baiduspider and checking that the home page, robots.txt and sitemap.xml all return 200.

Request my home page, robots.txt and sitemap.xml using Baiduspider's User-Agent and tell me each status code, response time and whether the content looks right.

Timelines and four common traps

Getting expectations right matters more than adding steps:

• Sites without Chinese ICP filing get indexed much more slowly (often weeks); filed sites usually see the first batch within days
• Hosting outside mainland China (Hong Kong, for example) still works for Baidu, but crawl frequency and speed are lower than domestic hosting
• Do not buy “fast indexing” or “guaranteed inclusion” services — Baidu has no such official product, and these are scams or rule-breaking tricks
• Content decides everything: a page with three lines of text gets crawled and then dropped

FAQ

The three questions we hear most:

• How long after submitting a sitemap do pages get indexed? — There is no fixed number. The console shows crawl status and index counts; expect days to weeks. If nothing moves, re-check the reachability points above.
• site:domain shows nothing — am I not indexed? — site: is a rough indicator with inaccurate counts; treat it as a hint, not proof. The console's index data is the real measure.
• Is Chinese ICP filing required? — Not strictly, but it affects indexing speed and available features. If your main market is mainland China, filing is where you end up anyway.

Next step

If you want the three on-site pieces (robots, sitemap, titles) generated in one go, start from any of the links below.