Global Translator Plugin For WordPress – WARNING!
Global Translator Plugin for WordPress is, on the face of it, a very handy little tool, the idea being that the more accessible your site is to a wider range of people, the better it will be for your traffic levels!
Unfortunately things do not always go as planned & this plugin does carry rather a high risk factor with its use.
I tried this plugin myself & whilst it did indeed create translated pages, it also started throwing up a ridiculous amount of error where Google was concerned.
The Global Translator plugin uses flag images to signify each language, yet on the version I tested, not one flag used an alt attribute! This in itself threw up dozens of errors, but the worst & most significant errors are when Google starts throwing up “404 page not found errors”, this is brought about by the way the plugin operates. It creates a html page for what is viewed by your visitors, so lets say you get a visitor from Jakarta, the plugin will create a html page in Indonesian for this visitor, but when the visitor leaves, the page gets cached ready for next time.
Ok sounds cool I know, but whilst cached, Google crawls your site, picks up this new page with an amended url & assumes it is new content & so it gets indexed. But eventually this plugin needs to clear it’s cache and so all cached pages are then deleted! Big Big mistake, because now when Google returns to crawl your site, it discovers that hundreds of pages cannot be found & therefore Google starts churning out 404 errors like there is no tomorrow!
Now I accept that there are probably methods to prevent Google from indexing these pages in the first place, but this should be included in the plugin & not left as a task to the blog owner, many of which may not have sufficient knowledge to be able to do this.
What follows is just one comment that I found relating to this plugin:
I had over 16000 translated pages using GT by users. From Yesterday Google is reporting 404 for all of them and my index page is going down like rock. I’ve removed GT from my site and added
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(it|ko|zh-CN|zhTW|pt|en|de|fr|es|ja|ar|ru|el|nl|
zh|zt|no|bg|cs|hr|da|fi|hi|pl|ro|sv|ca|tl|iw|id|lv|lt|sr|sk|sl|uk|vi|sq
|et|gl|mt|th|tr|hu|be|ga|is|mk|ms|fa)/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$2
to the last line of .htaccess just before #End WordPress as you said.
Is it correct? Where should I put it? Please help very fast
This poor guy learned first hand of the dangers of using this Global Translator plugin, so think very carefully before you find yourself in a similar situation. Furthermore when I tested this plugin, I used Google analytics to test just how often it was getting used & whilst the theory says it should increase your traffic, what I actually found was no more than 3% of site visitors actually used this plugin. Now from my point of view, I don’t think 3 in every 100 visitors warrants the sort of risks involved in using this plugin, however you may have a different view!
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Posted by Steve Nickson
on Oct 28 2011. Filed under Wordpress Plugins.
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