A week ago we published five district-level list pages: Shunyi, Chaoyang, Haidian, Changping and Tongzhou, all on the theme “Which IT operations companies are there.” We did everything we could: updated the sitemap, pushed to Baidu and Bing, submitted each page one by one on the Toutiao Search webmaster platform, installed auto-indexing code in the pages, and added publication timestamps.
Today we checked Toutiao Search again: not one of the five has been indexed. So we changed the question: if we can’t get in, then who is sitting on page one?
6 Keywords, 42 Results, Source by Source
| Search term | Company websites | Job/classified sites | Portal accounts/blogs | Short videos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beijing IT operations outsourcing companies | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Beijing IT operations companies | 4 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Which Beijing IT outsourcing company is best | 1 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Beijing enterprise network service providers | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 |
| Shunyi IT operations companies | 0 | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| Chaoyang District IT operations companies | 1 | 6 | 0 | 0 |
| Total: 42 results | 11 | 17 | 8 | 6 |
(September 12, 2026, first page of aggregated Toutiao Search results. “Job/classified sites” means recruitment websites and classified-listing websites; “portal accounts” means self-media accounts on portals such as Sohu and NetEase.)
Three Patterns We Spotted
First, official websites only have a place on “category terms.” For terms that name the industry outright, such as “Beijing IT operations outsourcing companies,” more than half of page one is company websites — and we are among them. This is the home turf of the official website.
Second, when people ask “which is best” or “what are the options,” there is almost no official website on page one. “Which Beijing IT outsourcing company is best” returned only 1 official website; the rest were ranking articles on portal accounts and short videos. All six results for “Beijing enterprise network service providers” were portal accounts and blogs, and every one was a “Top 10 website development companies” list — in the eyes of the search engine, that term refers to companies that build websites, not companies that build office networks. For this kind of evaluative, list-style question, search engines trust “a third party saying it” more than “the company saying it about itself.” This matches what we wrote in the August 31 article.
Third, district-level terms are completely occupied by job sites. All seven results for “Shunyi IT operations companies” were job postings for IT operations roles. The search engine reads that term as “find an operations job in Shunyi.” For our Shunyi list page to squeeze in, it first has to be indexed, and then fight for position against seven job listings.
So What Should We Do
- Keep relying on the official website for category terms. This is the only stable home turf an official website has, so keep getting the title, body copy and structured data right.
- For list-style and evaluative content, publish the same piece twice. One copy on the official website, one on a portal account or self-media account. Many of the portal-account articles on page one are not high quality at all; they win simply because they are “not a company website.” Our list articles are more specific than theirs — what we lack is just a spot on a third-party platform.
- Treat the company profile on job sites as a second official website. Page one for district-level terms is all job listings, and every listing carries a company profile below it. When AI looks up a company’s size and situation, it reads job sites too. Make the company profile state clearly what you do, where you are and who you serve — don’t just write “Welcome to join us.”
- Shoot at least one short video. The top three results for three of the keywords are short videos, and competition there is far lighter than for text. Explain in one minute “what we do, where we are and who we’re right for,” and post it on a video platform.
- Don’t rush the new pages on the official website. Our five district pages are still in the queue. But for the very same question — “which IT operations companies are there in Shunyi” — one AI assistant was making up company names before we published our page, then listed us in the top two on the afternoon of the day we published, and we were still there on both follow-up checks. We can’t confirm which page it read, but the timing lines up. AI assistants don’t rely entirely on search engine indexing, so the official website pages aren’t wasted — it’s just that the search engine route is slow.
A 10-Minute Self-Check
| Search these three terms | Count the sources on page one |
|---|---|
| City + your industry + company | Many official websites = home turf, keep going |
| City + your industry + which is best | Many portal accounts and videos = publish on third-party platforms |
| Your district + your industry + company | Many job listings = polish the company profile on job sites first |
This week we submitted enterprise verification for our Toutiao account; it is still under review. Once it clears, the list article and the pricing article will go up there first. In a month we’ll count these 42 results again, and the findings will go into this series.
We are Beijing Siwen Lide, based in Shunyi District. For 14 years we have focused on enterprise IT services and have served more than 1,000 business clients to date. This series is about the pitfalls we have run into ourselves along the way. If you would like to talk about your company’s situation, take a look at About Us, or call us directly at 400-686-2011.
