Regardless of whether foreign or domestic companies do business in China, most of them will choose to promote on Sina Weibo which is one of the Chinese social media platforms. On the one hand, Sina Weibo has a large user base. Promotion on this can cover potential consumers and build relationships with consumers. On the other hand, it can also stimulate user expression and actively spread for your brand. Domatters believes that many companies will post information or advertisements on Weibo and use external links to jump to their websites or product pages for promotion. But recently, Domatters paid attention to a news released by Sina Weibo that Weibo is ready to turn the knife on the external chain jump!

It announced that it would implement out-of-chain restrictions. In the future, out-of-chain jumps will only be open to some websites. Sites other than whitelists will no longer support short URL jumps.

What are the details of this external link restriction information?

Weibo said that since March 2011, Weibo began to provide free conversion of the website’s external chain conversion short chain, and short chain automatic parsing and jumping services so far, but it is not easy to control, and the people who drill the basket and take the loop are too much. There are many individuals or companies engaged in illegal marketing activities who always use the free link jump service provided by Weibo to maliciously publish some illegal gambling-related illegal information for promotion and publicity, so as to obtain illegal benefits from the diversion from outside the station. This has led to Weibo being asked by law enforcement agencies in many countries in China to rectify the website platform, which of course also affects the user experience!

Based on this, Weibo’s external chain has begun to restrict external chain jumps and open the whitelist mechanism. It will be officially launched in August 2020. In the future, Weibo will only provide free services to whitelisted websites, and URLs outside the whitelist will no longer support redirection. The rest of the websites that want to continue to jump need to apply for certification and report with Weibo, which can be used after the Weibo review is passed.

• The following are some whitelisted sites given by Weibo:

1. Government website (ending with .gov.cn);

2. Regular media website;

3. Major portals;

4. The enterprise independently declares the formal website after confirmation to the Weibo platform.

• The following are the requirements for enterprise website to apply for whitelist of external links:

1. The official website of the corresponding enterprise must be declared using the private letter of the enterprise authentication account

2. Enterprise Blue V account needs to be within the annual review period.

3. The main unit of the ICP record provided is the same as the main body of the company with the certified account. (If the main body of the website does not have an enterprise authentication account, it needs to be declared after authentication)

4. It is necessary to ensure that the content of the declared domain name website is legally compliant in China.

Some netizens said: “Sina will control the external links of Weibo by means of adding a whitelist to provide free external link jump services to the sites in the whitelist. The original intention is good. But this will not evolve to the end. What is about the bidding ranking mechanism? After all, Sina is the first big drainer in China.As long as enterprises give money, or give more money, they can be whitelisted. But we are afraid that Weibo only recognizes money but not people!”

Whether it is for charging, or Weibo also just wants to learn Baidu and Tencent to trap their own traffic. With Weibo doing this, ordinary Weibo users may not be able to publish URLs on Weibo. And for some companies that want to promote it, it is also very troublesome. In the future, it is estimated that they will publish their external links on Weibo, and they will lack a website’s external links and channels for the promotion of self-media articles. And we don’t know if the previously published link can be opened. If it cannot be opened, those domain name jump links will completely become dead links!

If you don’t want to lose the large traffic pool of Weibo,you have better to submit the whitelist of the external chain as soon as possible.

In any case, Weibo is still a super large traffic pool in China. On May 18 this year, Weibo released its first quarter earnings report for 2020. As of the end of the first quarter,the monthly active users of Weibo reached 550 million and daily active users reached 241 million, a net increase of 85 million and 38 million compared with the same period last year. Single-season growth both hit record highs. The monthly active users of mobile terminals exceeded 500 million, and the proportion of users reached 94%.

Therefore, even if we are only aiming at a user base as large as Weibo, regular companies that meet the requirements of the enterprise websites listed above for domatters to apply for the external chain whitelist should submit it for review as soon as possible. Of course, as  gray companies,we do not recommend submitting.

Finally, attach the micro-blog white-chain whitelist submission review address of the corporate website: https://jianye.hd.weibo.com/site/?id=1096