Qunar is at the top rung of what is arguably the most lucrative and competitive niche in search: the online travel market in China. The company ranked first last March among Chinese travel websites in terms of daily page views, appears on the first pages of Baidu and Google.com.hk for generic travel keywords, and stands to benefit massively from its dominant market position since only 8% of Chinese have ever used an online booking service before.
“We really kicked a lot of ass,” says Qunar CEO Fritz Demopoulos of his company’s success. A Los Angeles native, Demopoulos is one of the few foreigners to have co-founded a Chinese Internet company that has achieved majority market share. “Foreign companies can succeed,” he explains in a China Daily interview, “but they are going to have to do what everyone else does.” While Qunar itself is a Chinese-registered company, Demopoulos’ do-as-the-locals-do strategy says a lot about how the company operates — particularly its search engine optimization tactics.
For example, many Chinese websites offer visitors in their footer a selection of “friendly links” (友情链接) — a holdover from an earlier era in China’s Internet development. Today, SEO specialists and website owners abuse these links by buying and selling them for their own gain. Qunar, too, is paying for these links at scale, encouraging excessive reciprocal link exchanges, and selling similar links on its own website for the purpose of influencing its ranking in search engines. This poses a considerable risk.
Qunar buys "friendly links" on footers of other Chinese websites to boost its own rankings in search engines.
(Top) A Laotian website selling links from Chinese websites.
(Middle) Paid links on agri.org.cn, Qunar highlighted.
(Bottom) Source code of agri.org.cn showing the links are followed by search engine spiders.
Considered a link scheme by Google, the American search giant will either discount the value of these links in its algorithm or hit the website with a manual penalty demoting or excluding it from their index. Baidu, on the other hand, isn’t as hostile toward paid links. “Unlike Google,” says Michael Bonfils on Search Engine Watch, “link building [for Baidu] is all about quantity, not the quality of links to your site.” Baidu’s overwhelming market share (currently 83.6%), coupled with its recent investment in Qunar to become majority shareholder, ensures almost zero risk of Qunar being penalized by Baidu.
This isn’t the first time Qunar has attempted to expand its visibility in search engines. In 2008, rival travel website Ctrip.com found that Qunar was scraping and copying their user-generated hotel reviews. The case was heard by Haidian People’s Court of Beijing and the court ruled in favor of Ctrip. In addition to paying lawyers’ fees, Qunar was made to post an apology for 24 hours on its home page.
Qunar’s investment by Baidu is evidence that the web in China is still immature. Following Google’s exit from the mainland and subsequent market share decline, search quality remains inconsequential to the only remaining player. Unlike Google, who penalized beatmyquote.co.uk for paid links shortly after acquiring them, Baidu is not likely to penalize Qunar for buying its way to the top.
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