Baidu, one of the largest Chinese search engine in China, has been caught for generating revenue through generating fraudulent traffic for advertisers. Instead of using SEO tactic, it seems that if advertiser will to pay a higher price, their website will be on the front page of search engine. Thus, a lot people have got scammed by advertiser especially some scam cancer treatment clinic in China. Baidu’s stock has been on a bull run, on speculation that Google would leave the country. But is it a good thing to let Baidu scamming all over in China or to let an international brand - Google into China? I would prefer the latter. How about you?
Does this mean they agreed to change or manipulate SERPs' rankings in exchange of "extra payment" from advertisers?
That's their wish. If they want business from all over world then they must have to do anything to change Baidu search engine algoritham.
they should do something about it...before they lost most of their subscriber google is just around waiting...
The script this search engine is using is a commercial one.. about $300- ... now you can prioritize the listings via the admin section.. i actually used this script about 1 year ago.. it's nasty, cheap and full of bugs.. but you can very easily make certain sites show up first for certain keywords / phrases.. your opening post does not surprise me at all... but as the own the search engine / site i can not see an issue unless they are using non-related keywords to serve the site up as first position.
what you mean you cant see any issue with that. thats sucks dude. if you have a search engine and in that search engine there is Organic search results and paid search result and you manipulate the organic ones for payment then you cheat and it count as a fraud what are you talking about that as scammy as a search engine can get. organic results shouldnt be touched or manipulated in any possible way.