The author of the global translator plugin claims with a screenshot that it acts as a traffic booster for a blog.
You will notice an increase in traffic of your blog initially after you install this plugin because of visitors from foreign search engine but unfortunately the problem is that you will face penalty from the search engine giant, Google and ultimately will hamper your site’s SEO. The reasons to avoid this plugin are discussed below.
Google clearly stated on webmastercentral blog that:
“We recommend that you do not allow automated translations to get indexed. Automated translations don’t always make sense and they could potentially be viewed as spam”.
Google hates spamming and if they find out that you are spamming by storing translated page on database then they will kick your site out of their search engine database !
Below are the problems faced by one blogger, Adnan who shared his experience through comment on the blog, silkenhut
“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:
1. 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.
2. 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 http://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”.
3. 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. Marhgil 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.
4. 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 uninstall the Global Translator plugin from my blog until further notice.”
Above are the problems with Google. Other problems you may face with global translator plugins are:
1. Too much server load
2. Lots of space will be consumed to store the translated page
3. Too many query in a page will slow down your site
4. Duplicate content issue
5. You will get lots of 404 pages
Uninstall the plugin right now if your are using it and edit your 404 page using the post on create custom 404 page
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