Baidu Webmaster Tools in English: A Guide to the Console

You opened ziyuan.baidu.com, the whole interface is in Simplified Chinese, and you have spent five minutes looking for a language switch. There isn't one. Baidu Webmaster Tools has never shipped an English interface, and there is no sign that it ever will.

This guide is the console explained in English: what each screen is called, what it does, which Google Search Console feature it corresponds to, and where the process actually breaks for a company based in Europe or the UK.

First, the name

You will see three names for the same product and they cause a lot of confusion.

百度站长平台 (Baidu Zhanzhang Pingtai, "Baidu Webmaster Platform") is the old name. Most English blog posts still use it.
百度搜索资源平台 (Baidu Sousuo Ziyuan Pingtai, "Baidu Search Resource Platform") is the current name, and the one on the site today.
Baidu Webmaster Tools is what everyone outside China calls it, including this article.

All three point at ziyuan.baidu.com. If a tutorial sends you to zhanzhang.baidu.com, it is old but the redirect still works.

Do not confuse it with 百度统计 (Baidu Tongji), which is Baidu's analytics product and a separate login. Webmaster Tools is the indexing and crawl side. Tongji is the traffic side.

Reading the console without Chinese

Browser translation gets you most of the way. Chrome and Edge translate the platform reasonably well, and Safari is passable. Three warnings before you rely on it:

Menu items rendered as images do not translate. Several icons and status badges are graphics. If a button stays Chinese after translation, that is why.
Never copy a translated code snippet. The verification meta tag, the auto push JavaScript and the API token are exact strings. Translate the page to read it, then switch the translation off before you copy anything out of it.
Error messages translate badly. Baidu's crawl errors are terse even in Chinese. The table below is more reliable than a machine rendering of them.

Baidu's own documentation, the 搜索学堂 (Search College) knowledge base, exists only in Chinese, and the support ticket flow expects Chinese too.

The account requirement, stated plainly

Before any of the console matters, you need a Baidu account (百度账号), and registering one requires SMS verification to a mainland Chinese mobile number. Numbers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the UK or the EU are not accepted at the registration step. Depending on what you do next, Baidu may also ask for 实名认证 (real-name verification) against a Chinese national ID or a Chinese business licence (营业执照).

That is the whole barrier, and it is worth being honest about it: for most European and UK companies, this is where the process stops. Everything below assumes you either already have console access through a Chinese entity or partner, or you want to know what the work actually involves before deciding whether to hand it over. There is a note at the end for the second case.

The console, screen by screen

Here is the navigation, with the Chinese label you will see on screen and what it does.

| Chinese label | English meaning | What it is for | Closest Google equivalent | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 用户中心 | User Centre | Account, sites, message alerts | Account settings | | 站点管理 | Site Management | Add, verify and remove properties | Property list | | 站点属性 | Site Properties | Site name, logo, category, contact | Nothing directly | | 链接提交 | Link Submission | Sitemaps, manual URLs, API push | Sitemaps plus the Indexing API | | 死链提交 | Dead Link Submission | Tell Baidu which URLs are gone | Roughly the removals tool | | 抓取诊断 | Crawl Diagnostics | Fetch one URL as Baiduspider | URL Inspection, live test | | 抓取频次 | Crawl Frequency | How often Baiduspider visits, and a request to change it | Crawl stats | | 抓取异常 | Crawl Errors | Failed fetches, with reason codes | Page indexing errors | | robots | robots.txt | Test and refresh your robots file | robots.txt report | | 索引量 | Index Volume | How many pages Baidu holds | Indexed page count | | 流量与关键词 | Traffic and Keywords | Impressions, clicks and queries | Performance report | | 移动适配 | Mobile Adaptation | Declare desktop to mobile URL pairs | Nothing directly | | 网站改版 | Site Revision | Declare a URL structure change | Change of address | | HTTPS认证 | HTTPS Certification | Register the HTTPS version of the site | Nothing directly |

Some of these open up only after a property has crawl history, so a new site will show fewer tools than a screenshot in a tutorial from 2019.

Verifying a domain

站点管理 → 添加网站 adds a property, then you pick one of three verification methods. Baidu verifies the exact host, so example.com and www.example.com are two properties, and so is each language subdomain.

文件验证 (file verification). Baidu gives you a file named something like baidu_verify_code-xxxxxxxx.html. Put it at the root of the domain and leave it there permanently. This is the method to choose if you can.

HTML标签验证 (meta tag verification). A tag in the <head> of the home page:

<meta name="baidu-site-verification" content="code-xxxxxxxx" />

CNAME验证 (CNAME verification). Baidu gives you a hostname to point at its servers with a CNAME record. Slower, because it waits on DNS propagation, but it survives a site rebuild.

Then press the verify button and Baidu fetches from a Chinese IP address. Which is where most failures come from.

Why verification fails when the file is clearly there

You can load the verification file in your own browser, and Baidu still says it cannot find it. Four causes, in the order they usually turn out to be true.

Your WAF or CDN is blocking Chinese traffic. A lot of European sites geo-block CN ranges, or rate-limit unknown bots, without anybody remembering that it was switched on. Baidu's fetch comes from mainland China and gets a 403 that you never see. Check the edge rules before anything else.

robots.txt excludes Baiduspider. Some boilerplate robots files block every crawler that is not Google or Bing. Baidu's crawler is Baiduspider, and it also uses Baiduspider-render for resources.

A single page app returns the app shell. If your router answers every unmatched path with index.html and a 200, Baidu receives HTML that is not the verification file and rejects it. Serve the file as a real static file ahead of the router.

A tag manager injects the meta tag. Baidu's fetcher is far less patient with JavaScript than Googlebot. If the meta tag is not in the HTML that comes off the server, treat it as absent.

If you want to confirm that Baiduspider is genuinely being served, verify the visitor rather than trusting the user agent: a reverse DNS lookup on the requesting IP should resolve to a *.baidu.com or *.baidu.jp hostname, and a forward lookup on that hostname should return the same IP.

Submitting URLs: four routes

链接提交 is the part of the console you will actually use, and it holds four separate mechanisms.

Sitemap. Paste an absolute sitemap URL. Baidu accepts XML and plain text lists. It is the slowest route and the quota is not generous, but it is the one that keeps working with no maintenance.

手动提交 (manual submission). Paste URLs into a box, one per line. Fine for a launch or a handful of new pages. There is a daily cap.

主动推送 (active push). The API, and the fastest way in. The console gives you a token, and you POST newline-separated URLs as plain text:

curl -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' --data-binary @urls.txt \
  "http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=https://example.com&token=YOUR_TOKEN"

The response is JSON. success is how many URLs were accepted, remain is what is left of today's quota, and not_same_site counts URLs that did not match the verified property, which is almost always a www mismatch. Wire it into your publish step rather than running it by hand.

自动推送 (automatic push). A small JavaScript snippet you paste into your pages. Every visit pushes that URL to Baidu. It costs one script tag and it catches pages your build process forgot, so it pairs well with active push rather than replacing it.

What the console cannot do for you

Getting indexed and getting ranked are different problems, and Webmaster Tools only helps with the first.

An English-only site will rarely rank on Baidu, however cleanly it is submitted. Baidu strongly favours Simplified Chinese content, and machine-translated Chinese performs badly.
Hosting matters. Sites served from inside China, which requires an ICP licence and therefore a Chinese entity, load faster for Chinese users and do measurably better.
Blocked third-party resources break your pages. Google Fonts, Google Tag Manager, YouTube embeds and several CDNs do not load from mainland China. Your page may render correctly for you and be broken for the audience you are submitting it to.
Client-side rendering is a real handicap. Server-side rendering is not a nice-to-have for Baidu.

None of that shows up as an error in the console. It shows up as an index volume that climbs and a keyword report that stays empty.

If you cannot get past the phone number

For most companies reading this, the console is not the hard part. The account is. And no amount of guidance changes the fact that Baidu wants a mainland Chinese mobile number for that SMS.

If your goal is simply to get the site submitted and to know what Baidu did with it, you do not have to solve the account problem at all. Our Baidu submission service takes your domain, runs the whole submission, and reports back on what Baidu actually indexed, at a fixed price per domain. What we need from you is one domain ownership check. What you get is the submission and the report, not a login: account credentials are not part of the service.

If the wider picture is the question, a China-ready build, Simplified Chinese content, hosting that works behind the Great Firewall, then book a call and we will scope it properly.