I recently stumbled on a very exciting WordPress plugin – the Global Translator plugin! This plugin automatically translates the content of your blog into 34 languages. According to the author, the most powerful features of this plugin are:
- Four different Translation Engines: it has the ability to provide the translations by using Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations.com
- Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost.
- Fast Caching System: new fast, smart, optimized, self-cleaning and built-in caching system. Drastically reduction of the risk of temporarily ban from translation engines.
- Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE, DIV or IMAGE MAP based layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors
- No database modifications: Global Translator is not intrusive. It doesn’t create or alter any table on your database: this feature permits to obtain better performances.
This is a wonderful piece of innovation, not so? Just like many WordPress bloggers, I installed this plugin with the hope of multiplying the number of my posts in Search Engine indexes by 34 and hopefully increasing my traffic from non-English speaking countries tremendously. Three weeks later, I discovered that the amount of traffic from non-English speaking countries started increasing rapidly. But I have now sadly uninstalled this plugin from my blog. And here are the four major reasons behind this action:
- While traffic from non-English speaking countries increased rapidly, the overall amount of traffic did not increase significantly. The bounce rate was also very high. My understanding was that with the increase of traffic from the non-English Speaking countries, I would be getting not less than twice my usual traffic but that was not the case. After carefully examining the traffic on my blog, I discovered that some of the posts that used to bring me a lot of traffic from Google were now no longer doing so. A look at my pages pages indexed by Google and links to my site showed that the number of indexed pages had been reduced from 240 to 105 and links to my site had been reduced from 279 to 166 respectively. This led me to conclude that the Global Translator plugin was doing something fishy behind the scenes. Brooks and Mark A lamented about the same problem in their comments on John Chow’s post about this plugin. To which, Paul A responded by saying that Google do not treat translated pages as duplicate content. But the trouble comes when the translation service errors out a 302 because of automated abuse. The spider gets served that and breaks the linking structure of your site and destroys any internal linking strategy you may be using. The collapse of the site’s linking that causes PR drop and other content to stop being indexed.
- Most of these translators are not that good. For in stance, I usually use the Google Translator in order to translate emails from Japanese to English and vice versa. Even though what I get is far from perfect I understand that this translator is a work-in-progress. This, however, might not be the case with a visitor, from say Portugal, landing on your www.domain.com/pt/mycategory/mypost.He will not know that the page has been translated automatically and that the imperfections in the content are not necessarily coming from you but rather from the translator. Therefore, your online reputation is at stake. Carlton Bale went through a funny experience which left me in stitches of laughter. He says a native-speaker de-translated the “about me” page of his site. It stated that his gender was “little man” and that he “really like young goats but don’t have them yet”.
- Not all the 34 languages in this plugin are supported by Google Adsense. If you do not limit the number of languages, you might get penalized by Google Adsense. lists the languages NOT supported by Google Adsense that you have to disable on the Global Translator Plugin to make your Google Adsense in full compliance with their TOS. Although this a good development, it erodes the benefits of the plugin by limiting the its capability and, consequently, the reach of your blog.
- Finally, but not least, Google MIGHT penalize your site thinking that you’re setting up mirror sites in order to artificially inflate the number of links to your site. Google is so clever. Maybe they have already implemented a system to detect new links created by this plug in. Google can easily detect this by noticing that the number of pages on your site has increased by a factor of 34 in just one day.
In light of the four reasons, I have decided to unistall the Global Translator plugin from my blog until further notice.
81 users commented in " 4 Major Reasons why I uninstalled the Global Translator plugin from my blog! "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThere are lots of translating services. I’ve never tried global translator plugin. Maybe I will. Thanks for the information
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Timely advise. I was thinking of adding this plug in and after having read this very good analysis, I have decided against it. Thank you.
Nicole Price´s last blog post..The Offensive Israeli
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Well, the facts you have mentioned are really disappointing for this plugin, and i think you have made the right move. At the end, what could you expect more from automated process that makes machine translated content.
George´s last blog post..SeaWorld Orlando
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Translators have a lot of problems and none of them match getting a real translator doing the work for you.
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There is no software that do quality translation. Only human can do! I hope in future software translation systems will can do more quality work. So translation plugins is not good idea.
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Yeah I would uninstall it if I were you too, according to your reasons. I did install it once and it didn’t serve much purpose so I removed it as well.
Ben Pei´s last blog post..Top 10 Facebook Games Of The Year
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I always wanted to try such think but was afraid that google would penalize my site. Looks like I was right…Thanks for the report
Webkinz´s last blog post..Webkinz Jr. Releases by Ganz
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I think you’ve made the right move. I was using older variants of this for several years on many sites and not once did I notice an overall traffic increase above what you’d expect as a site ages. Even worse the number of mails I got complaining about the translation was a little embarrassing.
There was however a definite point at which a lot of my original content stopped getting indexed and PR started to drop. I take it as that point (late 2006) that Google caught on to what was happening. Certainly with Google’s translation service you can get a temp ban from as little as 20 requests!
Paul B´s last blog post..Using Your Forum Signature To Gain Traffic
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 7th, 2009 at 2:55 am
@Paul B: I got an eye opener when I read your comment on John Chow’s blog. From now onwards I will be taking a little more time before installing some of these seemingly interesting plug ins. I have learnt a bitter lesson. All that glitters is not gold, lol.
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There is still a box on the top left side of your blog that asks the reader to choose a language! Clicking on it does not make anything happen though!
Nicole Price´s last blog post..The Offensive Israeli
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 7th, 2009 at 2:52 am
@Nicole: That’s the new translation gadget that I am using after my problems with the Global Translator. It comes from Google, hence safe. I have just finished testing it on all the languages being offered, it is working without any problems at all. Maybe, it was not working when you tested it because of a temporal problem. Please do let me know whenever you see something fishy.lol.
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Great explanation! I’ll take that into account when I finally have my own domain.
Daddy Mike´s last blog post..Sinigang Recipe
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It is working fine just now. I shall let you know if anything goes awry.
Nicole Price´s last blog post..The Offensive Israeli
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
@Nicole: Looking forward to hearing the updates
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Great information thanks for sharing this with us.In fact in all posts of this blog their is something to learn . your work is very good and i appreciate your work and hopping for some more informative posts . Again thanks
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Thank you for your report, I’m new to blogging and I saw a website with that plug in,it was cool and was thinking to implement it on my own blog, but after I read this article I’ll just translate to language that supported by adsense.
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As a former professional translator I always say, that no automatic translator will be able to replace a human. Never. You will always get non-sense crap (hence the high bounce rate).
The only possible benefit from these automatic solutions, that I could think of, was direct and optimized links to posts in native language, but as you mentioned above, it makes things only worse.
Thanks for your real-life experience!
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For me, the only best translator is human. Automatic translators like Global translator plugins cannot give accurate and good quality translations. Before, I was amazed with blogs that has translator plugins…but now, I realized that blogs don’t need these plugins because automatic translators can have some flaws in their translations. So, visitors of your site may think that you cannot compose a grammatically correct content for your site.
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Thanx for the nice report…
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Hello Clement,
I’m glad that I found this post of yours about the plug in because if it were not for this post, I would have installed it in my blog without knowing the consequences at all.
I could have been banned from Google Adsense without justice here. Thank you very much. By the way, Marhgil is a fellow blogger here in the Philippines.
Ana
ana casuncad´s last blog post..PCSO Lotto Franchise
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
@Anna: Good to hear that my post has been of great help to you. Philippines seems to be on fire blogging wise. At present, Philippines gives me the third largest amount of traffic behind USA and India.
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Automatic translaters seem to have improved over the last years. I can still remember the early ones sounded really funny…
Maria´s last blog post..Shopping!!
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By the way, I think it gives alot more indexed pages with this plugin.
Ben Pei´s last blog post..Don’t You Want To Retire At 21?
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
@Ben: It gives a lot of indexed translated pages but the number of your original pages tends to decrease. The translated pages as explained in the post are also very poor. Your original pages go down in SERPs as well. In the next two weeks, I will write a followup post explaining how my blog is faring after removing this plugin.
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You’re right. Translation to Polish was awful. I found some results of automatic translation and the level of it was so poor it couldn’t be read.
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I had just installed it and noticed something wasn’t right. This now explains why. Thanks.
The Blogger Source´s last blog post..What Time Should You Post?
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wow really good info,,
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hm…. i will think about uninstalling my google translator…
thx for the advice
herry´s last blog post..Sudah Saatnya "Mobile Marketing"
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 28th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@henry: I say go ahead.
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Okay..some say it’s good and some say it’s more damaging than good.. I’m confused now
I installed this plug-in a few days back on my blog and thinking whether I should take it out or not now
Michael Aulia´s last blog post..Safari just gets prettier and better!
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Clement Nyirenda says:
February 26th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
@Michael:You can leave it in there for a little while and come up with your own independent evaluation. It will be good for me to learn from your experience. My experience with this plugin was very bad. I will write a follow up post when I find time in March.
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I’m sure that the creators of the plugin may take notice of the signaled issues, and they could solve those problems. Improving cache and force 301 redirects instead of 302, then add an option to allow or not allow adsense code depending on language, make some other small adjustments and the plugin will become perfect.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 1st, 2009 at 10:15 pm
@Gazduire: I agree with you. But I am still scared of Google. I think that Google will end up penalizing blogs that inflate their indexes dramatically.
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I, too, thought about using this plugin. However, after now reading your findings, I’m going to pass on it. I’ve never been a fan of translation services, because as you said, most are not very good. Some are simply, atrocious. Anyhow, thanks for the heads-up, especially in regard to how it negatively affected you with google.
Hip Hop Videos´s last blog post..Jay Rock x Busta Rhymes – Beat A Rapper Down
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Thanks for this post. I just recently started my blog and am planning to translate it into German later down the road. I’m a former freelance translator for ge en and I absolutely concur that these machines are horrible at their jobs. It would make life a lot easier if plugins like these really worked but I’m afraid that will never happen. Either way, I have enough wordpress plugins installed as it is and it’s already slowing down my site. Best is to use as few as possible, only the really necessary ones.
DTsFlashDriveBlog´s last blog post..Heart Drive
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I would add one more point for your explanation. When creating a page like domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost in order to substitute your page domain.com/mycategory/mypost you’re shifting down the level of your page.
And most search engines consider that as a signal to lower your page ranking…
So it’s not optimized too well…
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 26th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
@bintsarouski: Your point seems to explain why the new pages rose up in SERPs at the expense of the original ones.
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I installed this plugin yesterday and now i find your post. I don’t know if uninstall it from my blog.
I think i will try it in this blog. Anyway i don’t have too much traffic in this blog.
ejerciciosconpesas´s last blog post..Descubre tu somatotipo III.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
March 26th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
@ivan: The decision is up to you. I just shared my experience with this plugin.
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[...] Also read : Why clement uninstall the Global translator plugin? [...]
Hello Clement,
can you please tell how to remove the gt-cache folder ??
I want to turn them into 404 not founds so at least I do not suffer duplicate content issue
Thanks,
Regards,
Sanjay
Sanjay´s last blog post..Windows 7 Build 7072 Wallpapers Download
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I’ve uninstalled it from my blog. It’s a disaster, I’d recommend to all: never use it.
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[...] Whether you decide to use this plug-in or not, it’s entirely up to you. But you may want to read other bloggers who have decided to uninstall the plug-in too: Harsh Agrawal and Clement Nyirenda. [...]
i installed it now and filtered the languages which not match with adsense TOS ,but don’t know about search engines yet .
Mohammed´s last blog post..know what is blackhat SEO ( black hat SEO ) so your website don’t get banned from search engines
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Clement Nyirenda says:
April 14th, 2009 at 9:42 am
@Mohammed: Are you good at SEO? If you are, I am sure you will notice something.
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I’ve published a how to uninstall Global Translator plug-in post on my blog if you guys are interested: http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/how-to-uninstall-global-translator-plug-in-properly.html
Hope the post helps
Michael Aulia´s last blog post..How to uninstall Global Translator Plug-in properly
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Thank you ! I had installed it on my site.
soissons´s last blog post..Twazzup nouveau moteur pour des recherches sur Twitter
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I installed it in my blog and in a few day I have 2875 unreachable URLs!!
Because it links to translated pages but those are not translated yet. For example www.mypagecom/mypost links to www.mypage.com/fr/mypost
And translator plugin caused my site to be banned at google translator.
Now I don’t know if uninstall it because I’m affraid to be penalized anyway in google
I think install this plugin is a bad idea.
pablogs´s last blog post..Entrenamiento para aumento de volumen muscular.
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Hi Clement, after reading your post i decided to remove gt plugin from my site. I was just wondering how do we remove the urls it created via webmaster tools? Do we go for directory removal?
Also in this article you said you were going to write a follow up post to tell us how you site was affected by the removal of gt plugin. do you have a link to this article please?
thanks
Jen
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Clement Nyirenda says:
April 25th, 2009 at 11:00 am
@Jenny: My followup article will take some time before it is done because I want to include more information. For the time being, you can take a look at Michael Aulia’s article: http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/how-to-uninstall-global-translator-plug-in-properly.html. He gives some good tips on how you can uninstall this plugin properly.
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Man too bad it didn’t work out for you.
I’ve considered that feature on my website but I am rethinking it now.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
April 25th, 2009 at 10:34 am
@John: Don’t go for it.
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I’ve been testing it for a couple months now and can say that while I’m not overly impressed with it, I have seen a minor increase in traffic unfortunately, the plugin author doesn’t seem overly concerned with improving the tool.
Christopher Ross´s last blog post..How do you move a website to a new domain?
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Clement Nyirenda says:
May 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 am
@Christopher: Longing to hear more updates from you on this issue.
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I have always been suspicious about the quality of the translator plug ins, the outcome sometime becomes very funny and meaning less.
Adsense is the only resource of my earning and if Google will penalize me because of this plug in what will I do.
Thanks
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i think global translator is good plugin if you want more visitors.
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I found no good use of this plugin so I uninstalled it on all my blogs. One of my average traffic blog just plummeted it’s keyword ranking so I uninstalled and use the URL removal tool to get rid of it on the Google index. Also I made another experiment on my very low traffic blog (less than 100 uniques a day) to check if it will have some improvements.
At first when the traffic dived, I thought it was just temporary. But it never change. Worst is all those indexed translated pages are not getting any traffic so why prolong the agony?
I was just curious why high traffic blogs like John Chow or Marhil are successful using this plugin.
Lito ´s last blog post..Twitter Background
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Clement Nyirenda says:
June 7th, 2009 at 12:34 am
@Lito: I think they deactivate automatic translation.
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I’ve had similar experiences. You summed it up pretty good! I was especially worried about your 2nd point, foreign-language-speakers who come to the site not knowing it has been translated… that can’t possibly be good.
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Hi Clement,
The last sentence of this insightful post reads:
“In light of the four reasons, I have decided to unistall the Global Translator plugin from my blog until further notice.”
However, when I tried the Google Translator at the top of the page it was still working.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
July 29th, 2009 at 10:49 am
@Sam: The Global Translator plugin remains deactivated on this blog until further notice. The Google Translator at the top of the page is different from the Global Translator plugin in that it is run directly from the Google servers when the visitor selects a particular language.
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Those translations are always inaccurate, but if you have some banners or links to your products it is enough to have some clicks. Of course I’m talking about sales sites.
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When I go through my server logs I see that many people are using translator services to translate the content on my site.
I think this is the best method. It doesn’t put any additional stress on your server and leaves the decision of whether to do it or not up to the user.
All this PHP, SQL and Ajax stuff makes your server busy enough already
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Thanx for the nice report… I found some results of automatic translation and the level of it was so poor it couldn’t be read.
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Lukily i never install this plugin in my blog. Thanks for sharing your experience.
.-= chandra wijaya´s last blog ..Toad Issue, The backspace, Up, Right, Left and Down Arrow Keys Not Working =-.
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Good thing I read this before installing this plugin. It’s becoming way too hard to find a quality online translator, especially ones that translate outside of just the handful of more popular languages (English, French, Spanish, etc.)
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Clement Nyirenda says:
October 28th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Good for you. It took me several months to repair my blog from the damage caused by this plugin.
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Great Post.
I was actually planning to install this plugin on my blog, but thanks to this post you have managed to make me think otherwise. These translate plugins aren’t of top quality anyway, because the translated writing is often very poor.
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I once thought of installing a translator. So, I tried out google translator offline. I noticed that quite often it breaks the content flow & sometimes even changes the meaning completely. How could anyone enjoy the translated version? So, I didn’t go ahead with any translator. But I didn’t know that a translator plugin can break the internal linking structure as well. Thanks for cautioning on that.
.-= Gouri´s last blog ..Pangrams =-.
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I have problem with Global Translator plugin actually. I have activated it and put required code into sidebar.php, but when i click on any flag it redirects me to homepage without any translation.
What do you think is wrong here?
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Hi Clement, after reading your post i decided to remove gt plugin from my site. I was just wondering how do we remove the urls it created via webmaster tools? Do we go for directory removal?
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Clement Nyirenda says:
December 9th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Yes, I used the directory removal. It is a tedious process.
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I decide to uninstall GT as well, the problems I noticed were caused by bugs never solved by D.Pozza.
Some weeks ago i found new plugin based on GT, but fully supported and developed.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bens-translator/
bye
G.
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Clement Nyirenda says:
December 17th, 2009 at 8:47 am
I wish you all the best as you install new plugin. In my case, I will not install any Translator plugin that automatically generates translated pages and allows them to be cached by my web server so that they can be displayed as normal webpages.
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I am trying things on my new blog. As I bought my domain yesterday only , so its not risky to try anything. I also installed global translator and uninstalled it after reading several posts as above. Later I installed qtranslator and again uninstalled it. But even after removing the plugins completely, I see the links are working though they show the same english page on all pages of other languages. suppose “amitsharma. co. in” is my site the italian language site “amitsharma. co. in /it” is still working and shows english homepage. Any clue so as to what should i do?
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i dont think that google really cares how many pages pop up overnight. i really dont think that hurts its rankings. otherwise, it would hurt the rankings of the hundreds of times ive migrated websites from one domain to another for whatever reason. i DO agree, however, on your views on local traffic loss and the adsense thing.
i was actually searching blogs to figure out how to get mine fixed. now i think its just better if i uninstall it. thank you so much for this post.
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Yeah you’re right.. i’ve got a lot of problem because of this plugin like my blog Israel Attack,, i don’t know why the theme become crash after installed it..
Nardiansyah´s last [type] ..Ships Rachel Corrie Never Stop Unless ‘Forced’ Israel
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Glad I read your post, I have decided against this plugin!
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Thanks for the information, I would just install this plugin when I saw your blog in search results. Now, I will not do this expriment.
Greetings from Sweden
Fredrik´s last [type] ..Links
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the global translator plugin is AWEFUL, I have spent the last month repairing the 404′s it created, over 10,000 404′s….that hurts SEO and SERP; big time.
For the average website user it can do allot of damage, DO NOT USE THIS PLUGIN, the designer should send out an apology and remove it from the plugin directory, this plugin can in now way benefit a website absolute Garbage…I wish I could express myself to the designer.
Before installing any plugins I highly advise people to do some extensive research. Plugins should be kept to a minimum, there are many out there as there are many different sites that can benefit from different features.
So much time wasted on this garbage Plugin, DO NOT INSTALL THIS OR any other automatic translator plug in
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Thank you for the detailed analysis!
I have been reading a lot about Global Translator, and the benefits it offered bloggers, but this is the first time I’ve come across the serious detriments of having the plugin installed. As much as I’d like to increase readership, I won’t do it at the cost that you pointed out.
Raquel Fernandez´s last [type] ..Are All Translation Services The Same
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