Warning Against the WordPress Translation Plugins
- SEO |
Hi all,
I have always been thinking about having my blogs in different languages, specially the popular languages like Spanish and Chinese. The first solution that comes to mind is hiring a human translator for each language and translating the pages by hand. However, it can cost a lot of time and money specially when the blog/site has too many pages, articles and... .
Another way the starts blinking in your mind is using the free online translation engines like google and bing translators, to auto-translate the pages. I did several tests and found out that if you translate the English texts using the google or bing translator, it will be known as a unique content by google.
Long time ago, I did this for one of my client's sites. They wanted to have traffic from as many country as possible. I translated the pages to several different languages including Spanish and Chinese using the Bing auto-translator. Google indexed the translated pages and they started receiving an amazing amount of search traffic. Imagine you have a blog with 1000 articles and you translate them to at least 10 other languages. You will have 10x1000 new unique pages, and you will get a lot of free targeted traffic from google.
It is amazing, right?
Wrong!
You will get a lot of traffic through those translated pages, but you will be banned or penalized by google if they find out that you have used an online translator like google translator to do that. This is known as spam by google.
The reason is that these online translators are not well developed yet at all. They still do a terrible job. If you translate your blog posts using these online translators and put them on your site, they will be indexed by the search engines and they will receive search traffic, but when people visit those pages they will not understand anything, because the translation quality is too low.
This is what google does not want at all. They want to provide quality content for their searchers, not just a bunch of meaningless words and sentences.
Luckily I was on time enough to remove those auto-translated content from the site and remove it from google through a robots.txt file, otherwise it could be ended to a disaster.
I am writing this to warn you against the Wordpress translation plugins. All of them use the free translation engines like google or bing. One of them is well-developed and is sold for a $195 fee, plus a lot of other things that you have to pay to add to it. Probably those who developed this plug-in know nothing about SEO and the way search engines like google want the websites contents to be.
If you want to have your website or blog in different languages, the only acceptable way is doing it through human translators, not through the plugins that translate the pages using the online translation engines.
The other thing that you have to note is that even if you hire a human translator you should only cover the languages that you can really offer your service to. You can not have your website in as many language as possible, even if you translate the pages properly and through good human translators.
Some of the plugins can translate your blog pages to over 70 different languages. This will be known as spam definitely. Hear what Matt Cutts says:
I have always been thinking about having my blogs in different languages, specially the popular languages like Spanish and Chinese. The first solution that comes to mind is hiring a human translator for each language and translating the pages by hand. However, it can cost a lot of time and money specially when the blog/site has too many pages, articles and... .
Another way the starts blinking in your mind is using the free online translation engines like google and bing translators, to auto-translate the pages. I did several tests and found out that if you translate the English texts using the google or bing translator, it will be known as a unique content by google.
Long time ago, I did this for one of my client's sites. They wanted to have traffic from as many country as possible. I translated the pages to several different languages including Spanish and Chinese using the Bing auto-translator. Google indexed the translated pages and they started receiving an amazing amount of search traffic. Imagine you have a blog with 1000 articles and you translate them to at least 10 other languages. You will have 10x1000 new unique pages, and you will get a lot of free targeted traffic from google.
It is amazing, right?
Wrong!
You will get a lot of traffic through those translated pages, but you will be banned or penalized by google if they find out that you have used an online translator like google translator to do that. This is known as spam by google.
The reason is that these online translators are not well developed yet at all. They still do a terrible job. If you translate your blog posts using these online translators and put them on your site, they will be indexed by the search engines and they will receive search traffic, but when people visit those pages they will not understand anything, because the translation quality is too low.
This is what google does not want at all. They want to provide quality content for their searchers, not just a bunch of meaningless words and sentences.
Luckily I was on time enough to remove those auto-translated content from the site and remove it from google through a robots.txt file, otherwise it could be ended to a disaster.
I am writing this to warn you against the Wordpress translation plugins. All of them use the free translation engines like google or bing. One of them is well-developed and is sold for a $195 fee, plus a lot of other things that you have to pay to add to it. Probably those who developed this plug-in know nothing about SEO and the way search engines like google want the websites contents to be.
If you want to have your website or blog in different languages, the only acceptable way is doing it through human translators, not through the plugins that translate the pages using the online translation engines.
The other thing that you have to note is that even if you hire a human translator you should only cover the languages that you can really offer your service to. You can not have your website in as many language as possible, even if you translate the pages properly and through good human translators.
Some of the plugins can translate your blog pages to over 70 different languages. This will be known as spam definitely. Hear what Matt Cutts says:
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KevUK -
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SEO Power -
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