Baidu URL Push API Explained — Faster Indexing for Chinese Search Traffic

For sites targeting users in China, Baidu indexing is often the first gate to organic traffic. Waiting for Baidu's spider to discover new URLs on its own can take days or weeks — too slow for product launches, blog posts, or landing page updates.

Baidu Search Resource Platform (百度搜索资源平台) offers a URL push API (普通收录 API) that lets you actively submit URLs instead of relying on passive discovery. This article explains the benefits, setup steps, and how IndexMate can handle Baidu submissions together with Google and Bing in one workflow.

Why Use the Baidu URL Push API?

Compared with only submitting a sitemap or waiting for crawlers:

Core advantages:

1. Higher priority — Pushed URLs enter Baidu's crawl queue faster than URLs discovered only through internal links or sitemaps.
2. Precise control — Submit only the URLs that matter: new articles, product pages, or updated landing pages.
3. Batch efficiency — Up to 2,000 URLs per request, suitable for automation scripts or tools.
4. Quota visibility — The API returns how many URLs succeeded, failed, and how much daily quota remains.

API push improves crawl speed, not a guarantee of indexing. Pages still need quality content, valid HTTP status, and compliance with Baidu's guidelines.

Prerequisites

Before calling the API:

1. Register at and verify site ownership (file, HTML tag, or DNS).
2. Ensure at least some pages are already indexed (new sites should build basic presence first).
3. Get your token (接口调用密钥) from: 数据提交 → 普通收录 → API 提交.

API Overview

• Endpoint: http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site={your-domain}&token={your-token}
• Method: POST
• Body: Plain text, one URL per line, UTF-8 encoded
• Limit: Up to 2,000 URLs per request
• Quota: Ordinary sites typically get up to 100,000 URLs/day (快速收录 requires separate approval)

Example (curl)

curl -H 'Content-Type:text/plain' \
  --data-binary $'https://www.example.com/page-a\nhttps://www.example.com/page-b' \
  "http://data.zz.baidu.com/urls?site=www.example.com&token=YOUR_TOKEN"

Example response

{
  "remain": 99998,
  "success": 2,
  "not_same_site": 0,
  "not_valid": 0
}

• success — URLs accepted for processing
• remain — Remaining daily quota
• not_same_site — URLs outside your verified domain

Best Practices

1. Use canonical, complete URLs — Include https://, match your verified protocol, no trailing junk.
2. Don't spam — Avoid pushing low-quality or duplicate URLs in large batches; abuse may reduce quota.
3. Push on publish — Submit when content goes live or after meaningful updates, not on a fixed schedule for unchanged pages.
4. Monitor in Baidu Ziyuan — Check crawl and index reports after submission.

How IndexMate Helps

Manually copying URLs into scripts or Baidu's console does not scale when you publish frequently. IndexMate is a local-first SEO workspace that includes Index Center for unified index submission:

• One-click multi-platform indexing — Submit to Baidu API, Google Indexing API, and Bing IndexNow from one place instead of switching between three consoles.
• Sitemap change detection — When your sitemap gains new or updated URLs, IndexMate can detect the change and create submission tasks automatically, so fresh pages are pushed without manual copy-paste.
• Submission history & retry — Track what was sent, when, and whether to retry failed URLs.
• Index status tracking — Monitor Indexed / Pending / Not Indexed states alongside submission logs.

For teams running SEO in China while also targeting Google and Bing, IndexMate turns "three separate API workflows" into a single analyze → submit → track loop.

Summary

• Baidu's URL push API is one of the most effective ways to shorten the path from publish to crawl for Chinese search traffic.
• Setup requires site verification and a platform token; requests are simple plain-text POST bodies.
• Push does not replace good content or technical SEO — it accelerates discovery.
• IndexMate automates Baidu submissions together with Google and Bing, including automatic detection of new sitemap pages for hands-off indexing workflows.

Further reading: