In October 2019, Baidu Search upgraded its Beacon-Fire Algorithm 2.0 to ensure equity in results and security for users.
This upgrade is mainly for websites with poor security, frequent hijacking problems, and active hijacking redirections.
Here, we discuss the details of Baidu’s Beacon-Fire Algorithm to help you better understand how to optimize for it.
Beacon-Fire Algorithm History
Before this update, Baidu launched two previous versions of the Beacon-Fire Algorithm:
- In February 2017, Baidu launched the Beacon-Fire Algorithm on mobile search only. The algorithm combated hijacking and security risks caused by fake and malicious websites.
Fake search results page
- In May 2018, Baidu launched the next version of its Beacon-Fire Algorithm. This algorithm severely punished offenders for stealing user data and malicious hijacking on both mobile and desktop search.
Offending sites were permanently banned. But Baidu offered two suggestions to resolve these offenses:
- Hijacking caused by websites with malicious code: Improve your website security through HTTPS transformation.
- Malicious code on the webpage: Clean the problem page.
Beacon-Fire Algorithm 2.0 Upgrade
The Beacon-Fire Algorithm 2.0 upgrade is mainly for websites with poor security, frequent hijacking problems, and active hijacking redirections. Beacon-Fire Algorithm 2.0 covers more sites than the previous versions.
This upgrade requires developers to rectify sites with active and passive hijacking issues, including black-out vulnerabilities, advertisement hijacking, JS hijacking, LAN hijacking, etc.
How do we avoid being punished by the Beacon-Fire Algorithm 2.0 upgrade?
To reduce the risk of website hijacking, we recommend that you:
1. Perform HTTPs transformation to enhance the security of your site.
The key takeaway is to improve the security of your website through HTTPS transformation—most search engines have confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS websites.
Search engines treat HTTP and HTTPS websites differently. If you migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS, search engines will treat this as a site move with a URL change. As such, redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects.
Baidu Webmaster Tools provides an HTTPS certification tool to notify Baidu when the site is updated to HTTPS.
2. Promote your third-party sites to transform to HTTPS, and ensure that there is no malicious hijacking of your third-party providers’ website statistics, website optimization, or promotional advertisements.
Baidu has concentrated on a group of high-risk third-party JSs. We recommend checking your JS code to determine whether your site includes any high-risk JS codes. If your site includes them, please communicate with your JS provider as soon as possible or remove the JS yourself.
