incrediBILL - 6:31 am on Jun 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

When we're all facing a huge downturn in the economy you would expect that Google would get all of their properties communicating properly to make sure they're maximizing every dollar possible both for themselves and their publishers.

Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case.

I just tested a handful of my own properties and some of other people's in both Google Translate and Google Cache to see what kind of ads are being displayed, and mostly it was a shocking and abysmal failure.

Most sites I ran through the Google Translator either went completely off target or displayed ads about translator services. Some did display the proper ads but it didn't matter because they were being displayed to me in ENGLISH, not in the translated language that I requested, which was either FRENCH or SPANISH.

What good are ads in English when I'm at the console (or some foreign kiosk) asking for the page to be shown in another language, wouldn't it be prudent to assume I wanted to see the ad content in the same language?

This wouldn't be such an issue except I run a site of worldwide interest and get hundreds, sometimes thousands, of translation requests per day and if the ads don't work there's little value of letting them use the translator.

FAIL.

Next, I went back to check and see if pages in Google cache, which have had problems for many years getting the AdSense ads correct, were still having a problem. Some of the sites displayed appropriate ads but others were still displaying off the wall ads totally unrelated to the site.

FAIL.

So there you have it, lots of lost revenue opportunity just laying around waiting for Google to fix some very basic bugs that would possibly generate revenue for everyone and give us a needed boost in this downturn economy.

<side note>
The Google Translator also inserted some Google text where my ad banner rotator lives so they just flat out nuked my banner ad system which is additional money lost.

FAIL
</side note>

What say you Google, any plans to fix these simple issues that impede our earnings when our pages are at the mercy of your own services such as translate and cache?

There's money being left on the table, MY MONEY, and I don't like it.

Fix it please.

Translate YOUR site, view YOUR site in cache, what do you see?

Are your ads being shown on target or worthless gibberish?

Let's find out how wide spread this problem is, if it's beyond my limited testing.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 7:38 am (utc) on June 16, 2009]