Global Translator WP Plugin - Effect on Ranking?

[mmontala]

I just wanted to share and know more about this plugin. Just recently I tried to install this plugin in my wordpress blog. The next day my traffic was cut to half and the SERP was also affected. Traffic driving keywords were gone. I noticed also in the admin panel>Global Translator Option that my blog was banned by the translator engines after it translated some pages and stored it in the cache.

My question is if you are banned by the Google translator engine, will Google Search also ban your site?

Thanks for reading my post.

[tedster]

I have no hands on experience with the plug-in, but I wanted to get a conversation rolling. So please, take these observations not as some kind of final word, but rather as fodder for discussion.

I wouldn't have thought that a ban from Google Translator would affect your established ranking in organic Google Search. Certainly many sites use the plug-in without seeing that effect. However, there may some tie-in here since your server's IP address would be in the referer at Google Translator.

What's more likely to cause a problem, IMO, is the creation of 13X more urls for your site, all at one time. I would hesitate to let googlebot crawl all those auto-translations, and especially all of them at once. The profile for the site would be very much like autogenerated spam pages.

However, the timing of this makes me wonder. Seeing SERP trouble just one day after the installation seems too quick to me, and there may be another issue with your website that's complicating things.

[conor]

I too have no direct experience of this plugin but in order to join the conversation I woukld look at the language encoding and the validity of the html that these autogenerated pages posses. Also are there any autoinserted links in the content that this plugin produces?

1 day seems a little quick for a penalty but if there is garbage html and/or garbage links it could be possible.

[mmontala]

@tedster
@conor

Thanks for joining the post. I also wonder why it is too quick but it didn't happen within the day but one day after. When I uninstall it the recovery is also one day after. Maybe there are other issues surrounding it so I'll look into it further. Thanks again.

[Robert Charlton]

I also have no direct experience with the plug in... but there have been a number of discussions, since automated translation tools have become available, of site owners wanting to use them to create additional content for their sites.

It appears that Global Translator is automating this process (a guess on my part), and it's likely therefore that Google would balk at the use of Global Translator, or of any tool that in effect uses Google Translate as a content generator. Google objects to automated search queries, eg, in part because of the extra load they place on Google's servers.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 11:31 pm (utc) on Jan. 24, 2009]

[tedster]

I believe you can use this kind of plug-in as a convenience for your visitors - that is, create and cache translations only on-demand, and keep those translated urls out of the index.

[anallawalla]

I don't know your plugin, but I use the Google Translator Widget on my WP blog with no known ranking problems. This one uses translate.google.com to do the translation -- it is not a generated page on my site. That could be your problem.

[Robert Charlton]

Again, I haven't used the Global Translator. The online info about it suggests that its cache is set up to avoid banning by translation engines. It also suggests that the "permalinks" of the translated pages are "search engine optimized," whatever that means.

The combination of optimized permalinks and caches, though, certainly suggests spiderable "pages." All together, this suggests to me that if there were enough activity to get banned by the translation engines (by creating a set of translated pages, eg), there would then also be enough additional urls to create problems as tedster describes....

What's more likely to cause a problem, IMO, is the creation of 13X more urls for your site, all at one time.

If used only on demand, the plug-in might not cause any problems.

[mmontala]

What's more likely to cause a problem, IMO, is the creation of 13X more urls for your site, all at one time. I would hesitate to let googlebot crawl all those auto-translations, and especially all of them at once. The profile for the site would be very much like autogenerated spam pages.

I think that is the culprit. Based on my observation when I enabled it again and integrating it on sitemap, it happens again. I have to remove those auto generated pages on my sitemap. Now the problem is how to gradually ad those pages to my sitemap since the sitemap plugin in wordpress don't have that feature. When you hit update, all of your pages will be included in the sitemap.

[tedster]

My advice is that you'll need a lot more PR/backlinks to support the increase.

[y0z2a]

I have just migrated a blog over from Blogger to WordPress on my own server, and have also implemented the Global Translator plugin.

I am working with 8 languages, but have restricted access with robots.txt to the domain.co.uk/lang/ folder. Thus far I have only enabled one extra language - French despite the fact that I have the 8 live on the site.

I would like to obviously have the site translated, as a lot of my potential market for this blog is international, however, will not do that at the sacrifice of PR.

I will let you know my progress.