ICP License becoming important Baidu SEO Ranking Factor?

One of our clients has been taking a hit on Baidu lately, and it’s not pretty. Their brand term is dropping like a rock, and we’re seeing impressions tank in Baidu Webmaster Tools—seriously, clicks have almost vanished in the last week. What gives? Well, there’s been chatter about the ICP license becoming a crucial ranking factor, and it’s time we delve into what that means for SEO in China.

We decided to take matters into our own hands and checked the live rankings. Surprisingly, our client’s site was still showing up for their brand term—phew, right? But then we spotted a red message right under the title. Yikes! It was like a warning light flashing, making it clear something wasn’t right. The screenshot we took anonymizes the ranking, but trust me, it was enough to raise some eyebrows.

The red textline says:

百度网址安全中心提醒您：该页面可能存在违法信息！

Translated:

Baidu URL Security Center reminds you: This page may contain illegal information!

Clicking on this message leads us to this page:

The Chinese message reads in English: This page may contain content that violates national laws and regulations, may spread illegal information or deceive consumers through false propaganda. To avoid personal losses, it is recommended that you visit with caution.

The user is still allowed to proceed to the page (just like you know it from the https-warnings of your browser, if the SSL protocol of the website you intend to visit has not been renewed), but the advise to not proceed.

There also two more links:

1. a link to review more detailed information
2. a link for the webmaster of the page to ask for removal of this block

Let’s have a look at the details first – what exactly does Baidu think our client is dowing wrong? What is the illegal content our client published on theior website?

Let’s follow the link to the details:

So basically what this page says is:

1. directly under the search form some general information about how many pages have been detected (328,926,695,388), and how many risks have been prevented by Baidu’s security measures.
2. Then it says that the website is basically safe, but that the provider is unknown (probably meaning no Chinese host) – that is the green shield with the big green characters 安全 (safe)
3. then it goes into detail reporting over tdifferent common threats:
   • Detection results of the site and its subpages – safe (安全)
   • Monitoring of fake or fraudulent websites – safe (安全)
   • Monitoring of Trojan-linked or malicious websites – safe (安全)
   • Monitoring of illegal content websites – safe (安全)
   • Monitoring of tampering – safe (安全)
4. then it reports about the ICP license status:
   • 没有ICP备案信息 – no ICP filing information

So, when you really break it down, there’s not a whiff of illegal info or any shady wording that Baidu seems to be complaining about. No frauds detected, no fake news, no Trojan horses or virus-spreading pages lurking around, and absolutely no illegal content. It’s like everything checks out safe and sound, except for that pesky missing ICP license. It makes you wonder—could this be the nail in the coffin for their rankings?

In our latest Baidu SEO ranking factors correlation study, we noticed something pretty striking—less than 50% of the top-ranking pages even bothered to display their ICP license in the footer, which is standard practice for those who have one. Even more surprising, this number was even lower in the Top 10 compared to those ranked 11-20. That’s a drop from around 70% just two years ago! It led us to think that while having an ICP license is best practice, it wasn’t a must-have for good rankings on Baidu.

But if Baidu is starting to crack down on sites without this license, we could see a whole bunch of websites slipping out of the rankings one by one.

To get an ICP license, a website needs to be hosted on a mainland Chinese server and have a registered company as a representation office in China. If Baidu goes down this path, it’s likely we’ll see fewer websites still hanging on to their rankings.

But honestly? We’re not convinced that’s what’s happening right now.

We suspect one of our client’s competitors might’ve lodged a complaint against them at Baidu. It seems like Baidu is just trying to protect its users—sidelining a site with security risk warnings makes it less appealing to visitors. And without an ICP license, the company isn’t officially playing by China’s rules when it comes to posting legal content.

But do we know for sure? Not really.

It could also just be the beginning of a trend where non-ICP licensed websites start to vanish from Baidu search results.