Chinese Character Sets

[steveareeno]

Our web site is currently offered in French, German, English and Chinese and uses the UTF-8 character set throughout. After doing a little research, it seems many Chinese sites use the character set that was selected by the Chinese government called GB2312. From an SEO perspective, is there a difference and is one better for global engines? For regional Chinese engines?

Thanks to all for your thoughts.

[seo4china]

From a Chinese user's perspective UTF-8 will render pages that cannot be read. Users will need to manually set their browsers to go to a Chinese character encoding, and believe me many will not be able to do it. For the Chinese sections of your page (I assume you are talking about Simplified Chinese here) you need to make sure that the character set is GB2312 or GB18030.

[steveareeno]

Thanks for your response but I am not sure if I agree with you 100%. UTF-8 and the two Chinese character sets both seem to render things pretty well without much loss. So if the user sets up for either environment, it should be legible. Per your point, if the browser is set up for AUTO encoding, then you are leaving it to the browser to select the best method and in that situation, I can see a possible problem. Do either character sets have more traction with search engines however? Thanks again.