Baidu Releases a Page Rank Checker
Last week, as a part their celebration of Baidu Webmaster Tools’ 5th anniversary, Baidu has temporarily released a very interesting tool for SEOs, roughly translated as “Intimacy Checker”. (Sounds weirdly romantic, right? That’s not an accident — read on to find out why.)
This tool provides your site with an Intimacy Score (亲密度) that indicates how strong the site stands in Baidu organic search. Many SEOs view this as a PageRank checker for Baidu — something they’ve never released before. Is this tool really the official Baidu authority metric we’ve been waiting for? Let’s take a look.
Here’s Baidu’s official comments about the concept of PageRank:
“Baidu doesn’t have Page Rank / Authority (Pounding on the blackboard, very Important)! But we do have a system of grading websites’ quality. This system contains almost 100 different grading areas, and the grading is dynamic — the same website can have a different grade within different scenarios and requirements.”
“百度没有权重！（敲黑板，划重点）但百度搜索引擎的确有一套衡量网站价值的打分体系，由近百种策略组成，但分值是动态的，即同一网站在不同场景、不同需求下获得的分值不尽相同。”
Our interpretation of this would be “This tool is an overall grading tool for your websites in Baidu. While it can tell you how strong your website stand in Baidu, it’s not 100% accurate in all cases.”
In the tool, Baidu will give a rating of 1-5 to your website, with increments of 0.5. That means if you multiply this number by 2, it is on the same scale as Page Rank.
Here’s the major letdown — unlike Toolbar Page Rank, Domain Authority or most other authority metrics available out there, you can only see a grade for websites that you’ve verified in Baidu Webmaster Tools.
This limitation greatly limits usefulness of this tool, but we think it’s still worth checking out for all your websites before the tool goes offline. The tool is likely only available temporarily — it’s a celebration activity for Baidu Webmaster Tools 5th anniversary after all.
Here’s what the grading result screen looks like:
If you are wondering about the romantic theme of the result page, this is because Baidu has branded their search algorithm as an attractive female named Du Niang (度娘) and SEOs in China are males that trying to start a relationship with her. Weird, right?
It’s pretty easy to get the score to your site, as long as you’ve already verified your site in Baidu Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done this yet, check out our Guide to Baidu Webmaster Tools.
Since you can’t get score for websites unless you’ve verified them within Baidu Webmaster Tools, you’re out of luck for competitor’s sites, industry research, or looking up anyone’s site other than your own.
Luckily, we’ve created an extremely accurate method of measuring organic domain authority in Baidu. It’s called Dragon Rank, and it’s an excellent method of discovering any website’s SEO strength in Baidu. Dragon Metrics uses its database of millions of keyword rankings on Baidu to objectively measure every site’s ranking ability.
Unlike PageRank, Dragon Rank is an ordinal ranking of all domains in our database of over 1.5 million sites. The website with Dragon Rank of 1 is the best performing website on Baidu. The lower the Dragon Rank (The higher the number), the less popular the website is to Baidu.
You can get Dragon Rank along with a ton more Baidu SEO insights for any website instantly by signing up for a free 30-day free trial. Give it a try today!