Some days ago I installed the Global Translator plugin for Wordpress here. I wanted to give it a go.
Lucky as I am Google quickly caught the new links and benefiting an acceptable PR the translated entry links were quickly listed in SERPs. Obviously not yet at their real rank but some very high. And I mean really high, like #4 among 570k results.
I had already noticed that the Google Translator service has been crawling this page for several days non stop now. But I didn’t expect translated pages to show up that fast and certainly not to be ranked this high.
Right at the moment I even consider those SERP listing rather spammy than a genuine aid. I am in doubt what to do.
Obviously if I remove the service this might result in thousands of 404 referrer. I could anticipate this problem with a 301 rule in the .htaccess file, but at the same time sounds hilariously that using a Google service, Google Translator, might set off a spam alert or influence the PR, worse even the Trust Rank, of anyone’s site.
Of course I couldn’t find any resources on this matter and pinging Matt Cutts will probably have exactly the same result as usual : None.
Being a popular man, Matt would even not notice a ping more or less.
Reading some of the translations and seeing where the translated entries are listed in SERPs, among what a quality sites such a crappy translations shows up, I think I might rather prefer not to use this service, than benefit the advantage of some more traffic over Google to this site.
The usage of that plug-in looks more black-hat than anything else (although Google doesn’t consider translations duplicate content).
And if I were a reader, I certainly would not stay long if I landed on an entry translated by Google. Oh boy.
UPDATE : For the time being I will prevent Google from further crawling the translations with some robots.txt rules. This way the plug-in stays a mere service for the reader and can’t have any other influences, or doesn’t do what I want.
Rather not being ranked than having a phony listing.
7 have made me smarter ↓
1 Heather // Feb 4, 2007 at 5:51 pm// View all comments by Heather//
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Glad aifn is back up.
2 Franky // Feb 4, 2007 at 5:54 pm// View all comments by Franky//
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whatevah :P
3 ListOfLists // Feb 24, 2007 at 10:20 pm// View all comments by ListOfLists//
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But I don’t really see the problem with the plugin. Do the multiple pages (in different languages) actually count as spam?
4 Franky // Feb 24, 2007 at 10:42 pm// View all comments by Franky//
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ListofLists, actually they aren’t and they can obviously grow your platform as well. But have you already seen the quality of the translations? I also speak French, German and Dutch and when I read the translations I thought OMG.
If I would find a SERP with that quality of English (well except for my sites -lol) on top in the Google results, I would say Google is getting spammier again.
5 ListOfLists // Feb 25, 2007 at 2:35 am// View all comments by ListOfLists//
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Thanks, Franky - now I see why you’d rather not have it. Cool site, only things is, when I enter the comment, letters apepar a lot slower than I type - probably due to the live preview.
6 Franky // Feb 25, 2007 at 2:45 am// View all comments by Franky//
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ListOfLists, I am aware of a flickr problem due to the comment-block and live preview, but on my computers the letters show up as I hit the keys. Even in the preview block.
Do you have a wireless keyboard maybe? Or any Firefox plugins that might cause any lag?
I use no keylogger or anything here. ;-)
7 Cucirca // May 25, 2007 at 4:25 pm// View all comments by Cucirca//
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After using global translator for some months I realize it brought me only bad thins.
I am removing it right now from my website and I’ll struggle to remove all my translated urls from google too.
Anyone has an idea on how to make a redirect from .htacess ?