Discuz is a popular Chinese open source CMS for forums and communities, which I wrote a little about in my last post. After that, I was quite amazed some English readers emailed us to ask about SEO issues for these Chinese CMS, especially for Discuz, so Ryan and I decided to wrote an article on SEO for Discuz. We brainstormed, talked to other Chinese SEO experts and listed all the details we think necessary for Discuz SEO:

1. Choose the right version:

There are always two versions of Discuz for you to choose from: UTF-8 and GBK. And I recommend you choosing GBK, an extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters. Although search engines always do full-text search, and in the end they may always know what language your site is in, but why not sort things out for them, so they know it is a Chinese site in the first place?

2. Gzip it to make it faster:

We all know speed is an important factor for SEO that affects spider’s crawling but also if search engines regards your site as a quality one. By default, Gzip is disabled for Discuz. You have to enable it by editing /config/config_global.php, making
$_config[‘output’][‘gzip’] = ‘0’;
Into
$_config[‘output’][‘gzip’] = ‘1’;

3. Edit the information:

One of the things people hate about CMS is that their default settings usually make the section messy.
A good news for you is that Discuz makes it messier,

Let’s take care of it:
Open “\template\default\common\header_common.htm”
Remove “Powered by Discuz” within the ;
Remove “” (optional, if you still believe it benefits your site’s rankings);

4. Let crawlers index your image files:

If you think acquiring visitors via image search is good for your site, you need to let crawlers access your image files. By default, Discuz forbids unregistered visitors from viewing images.