The Pain of Chinese SEO

So I intially made this post a question about Wordpress tags and duplicate content: Would the same tag in Traditonal Chinese and Simplified Chinese count as duplicate content when crawled by Google or other search engines and just how is that viewed by search engines?

Then i realized that I’m complaining about that, I could complain about the whole state of SEO in Chinese or really any international language on the internet. And it’s not really even limited to Wordpress either, it’s duplicate content questions, ugly shared links that result in something like https://example.com//%e6%88%91%e5%8f%ab%e7%8e%8b%e5%8f%af%e6%a3%ae/ being shared to social media, and just generally how international scripts are presented online.

I’m no expert on SEO either, I feel like I should just say that prior to continuing my rant lol. But the basis of SEO is that you want to optimize content on your website, so that it will be presented nicely in search engines and that you can get the max amount of visitors, right?

This is hard enough in English. Like you’ve got to deal with duplicate content that Wordpress just naturally creates, things like page speed, server response time, which is supposed to be under 200ms, and which I’m currently failing horrible at. Anyways. SEO is a bitch and it’s a lot to be at, but when your doing that in Chinese, is a whole other headache.

Plugins like Yoast that are awesome for SEO content? They essentially don’t do shit for Chinese content. 

So I’m actually looking up now just how those tags will convert. So basically we have to look at the way Chinese is essentially converted everywhere on the internet. Although Asian script is beauty, the way it’s converted on the internet is not lol.

So for example with Yoast, if we create a post let’s just use an example 我叫王可森, so you’d think the link would be like, https://example.com/我叫王可森 - but no lol. 

Here’s an example of that page then trashed and yoast creating a re-direct. Ugly as fuck right? So you essentially end up having a shit ton of links that are essentially just like random numbers and hashes, so it makes SEO a whole different game if your using Chinese on your website.

If I share that link on social media, Facebook for example, it’s going to show the link as https://example.com//%e6%88%91%e5%8f%ab%e7%8e%8b%e5%8f%af%e6%a3%ae/

It’s actually crazy when you think about it that international domain names were only approved as of 2010.

The problem isn’t Yoast tho, like yes the actual functionality of using Chinese with Yoast is not equal with using English, but is actually a much deeper rooted issue then just Yoast or some random plugins on Wordpress.

The problem isn’t limited to Chinese tho. I’m just complaining about Chinese because that’s what I’m using on some domains currently.

So for schema markup I just refer to this website because honestly sometimes English is not as straight forward as Chinese and I’ll get confused looking at the terms and makeup on the official Schema.org lol. 

There is actually a organization group on WW3 that’s working towards better useability of Chinese script on the internet.

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