Six tips for your Chinese web site

I was directed to the China SEO Blog for the first time. Search engine optimisation is an important topic when you have 160 million+ users to target.

Today's post is worth a read: Establishing a web presence in China: 6 pitfalls to avoid.

I was taken by points 4. & 5. which go somewhat against the advice on this subject I have been giving:

4. Hosting Overseas
While it is true that most sites hosted elsewhere are accessible in China, it makes sense to have your Chinese portion of your website hosted in China. Not only will you have the benefit of faster connection speed, but you will be more protected against potential IP blocking (if it happens that your host has been serving subversive sites and becomes blocked in China) or even natural disasters (remember the Taiwan earthquake that essentially cut access to overseas sites from China for days or even weeks in some cases).

5. Not registering with the ICP
Yes I know China is one of the rare countries that requires you to register your site with the authorities. But it is the way it is here and if you are in business here you need to comply with the regulations. You don’t want to “forget” to register your site and have its access suddently blocked for a month or two while you are in the middle of a heavy advertising campaign. Usually your local hosting will take care of that but you would want to double check. On major corporations sites you will find that ICP certificate number in the bottom of their main pages so just do like them.

That's all very well in theory. In practise, for media businesses at least, obtaining the proper internet content provider (ICP) license is nigh on impossible and that makes local hosting very hard too. In an ideal world, this is good advice, but China is not an ideal world for media companies.