After installing Global Translator Plugin for WordPress, Google’s Webmaster Tools (which you should sign up for immediately if you haven’t already), indicated that my site had gone from 0 unreachable links to over 4,000 in the matter of a week.
I appreciated the 300% spike in traffic that the Global Translator Plugin provided me, but the spike was shortlived and my SEO was damaged big time. Ultimately, content quickly went back to normal, although it increased my other-world traffic. The problems: the Global Translator Plugin increased my bounce rate, decreased ad revenue, and made it difficult to achieve high rankings for pages that should index well. This whole electronic translation thing is an awesome idea, but as it is now, this plugin (and others like it) just aren’t ready for use. The harm they do to your SEO could set your site back months (or worse).
Cleaning up Global Translator Plugin’s damage
If you suddenly decide that you need the Global Translator plugin like you need a hole in the head and are trying to quickly clean up the damage that it did, picking up the pieces is pretty straight forward.
First thing, make sure you have a robots.txt file in your site’s root directory. Then, cut and paste the following into it:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /it/
Disallow: /ko/
Disallow: /zh-CN/
Disallow: /zh-TW/
Disallow: /pt/
Disallow: /de/
Disallow: /fr/
Disallow: /es/
Disallow: /ja/
Disallow: /ar/
Disallow: /ru/
Disallow: /el/
Disallow: /nl/
Disallow: /bg/
Disallow: /cs/
Disallow: /hr/
Disallow: /da/
Disallow: /fi/
Disallow: /pl/
Disallow: /ro/
Disallow: /sv/
Disallow: /no/
Disallow: /iw/
Disallow: /sr/
Disallow: /sk/
Disallow: /th/
Disallow: /tr/
Disallow: /hu/
Finally, run over to Google’s webmaster tools and sign in and click on Tools > Remove URLs > +New Removal Request and select the radio button “A directory and all subdirectories on your site” and append all the url’s above to directory url. For example, removing all Italian pages would look like the following:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Is it the sitemap integration that causes all the problems, or is it the plugin as a whole. I’m wondering if the plugin is still useful for translation if you check the sitemap integration box?
The sitemap integration is the problem. The way the Global Translator plugin works does something strange with regard to the dynamic content on the site. It quickly increases the number of pages on your site, but for some reason, hundreds of them populate incorrectly and your sitemap ends up with thousands and thousands of unreachable link errors. If you use webmaster tools, you’ll see that the errors quickly compound. Cleanup is terrible.
The last part was confusing so I had to click everywhere to figure it out so here is the step by step simplify instructions:
Finally, run over to Google’s webmaster tools and sign in and click on your domain > click site configuration > crawler access > remove url > New removal request > then select “A directory and all subdirectories on your site” then append all the url’s above to directory url. For example, removing all Italian pages would look like the following:
Just trying to keep it simple
So easy a cave men can do it