In the early days, I understand that Baidu and Yandex were both known for excessive crawling with very little value for English sites, but those days seem to be gone now.

In those early days, I blocked both search engines, but now I allow them access to my site. It appears that both have picked up on my sitemap and are indexing my pages. I have also noticed an increase in traffic from these search engines putting Bing to shame, so I have no complaints so far.

Are there any statistics to demonstrate the value of allowing these search engines, either based on AdSense conversions or bounce rate, for English-based sites?

I am not looking for personal opinions on these search engines, I know that opinions can run strong and deep and I fully understand that. I'm just looking for metrics based on experience or from credible sources to indicate how worthwhile allowing access might be now.

  • The English search engine DuckDuckGo uses Yandex data when determining rankings. – Daniel F Mar 9 '15 at 4:02
  • @DanielF That is interesting. I have not been to DuckDuckGo in a long time- a friend of mine swears by it! Bing has been disappointing. I just thought since Baidu and Yandex seem interested these days and I am already getting traffic that seems to positively effect Adsense, I would ask the question. I have enough data on Baidu in GA now and I can see that their bounce rate is high, but it just might be that my site has to settle in a bit too. It takes a while for search engines to properly place links in their SERPs. I was curious what verdicts there were given more recent history. – closetnoc Mar 9 '15 at 4:09

Yes, the more search engines you allow to your site, the higher impression count you'll likely get with adsense.

Now if the websites main focus is on images and the english text mostly describes those images, then the images speak for themselves for the international users, so the remote search engines can definitely raise your impression count there. It's even better if the navigation buttons have images with them that completely describe the button. For example, the next page button could include a picture of an arrow pointing right.

Only way I don't see remote search engines being of any value is if the english text on the website makes very little to no reference to the image(s). The fix around this is to make the site multilingual and have the appropriate page displayed based on the language the client browser is willing to accept.

  • In the short time that I posted this question, I have seen the number of pages in Yandex and Baidu go up and down, but Baidu, so far, returns more users with 1/4 of the pages than Bing (which is rather poor) and the bounce rate has dropped to just less than Google. I would like to see more pages in their index. I agree- more is better. I was just wondering if their stats regarding CTR and bounce rate would be an issue and so far, it looks okay. Thanks for posting an answer! I will wait a while before accepting answers just to see what comes in- slow as it seems. One up-vote for now! – closetnoc Mar 20 '15 at 4:53

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