I have this little idea before that for me to attract more search engine traffic, I should start translating my blog to other languages. Like creating a sub-domain such as cn.macuha.com for Chinese version of this blog, using the Google Translate tool manually to translate my posts.
What I’m thinking is it doesn’t matter if the translation is poor or sometimes incomprehensible, as long as the Google ads are present. The post will be a poor translation of my post (Google Translate is far from perfect) making the Google ads standout because they are the one written properly in Chinese, therefore attracting more clicks. This seems a good idea, but it’s something that did not push through before because of procrastination. 🙁 And I’m a little bit lazy doing the manual translation of each post to other languages.
Last November 6, I installed the Global Translator plugin on this blog. It’s a plugin that does exactly what I wanted to do automatically. Except that the translation will not be on a sub-domain, but rather on a sub-directory.
The pages are not translated instantly. The translation takes time because the plugin cannot connect every minute to the translation engine. My settings on this blog only translate a page every 10 minutes. And with 600+ posts on this blog to be translated to 34 languages, that really needs a lot of time.
Before I installed this plugin, I only have 1200 pages indexed on Google. After a month, there are already 4550 pages indexed on Google. The logs shows that it has already 4491 successfully translated pages using 64.5 MB of my disk resources. I’m expecting at least 20,000 translated pages after 5 months.
Now, did it increase my blog traffic? Yes. Based on my statistics, this page alone gave me an additional 600 visitors for the last 30 days. Other pages are giving 1 to 2 additional visitors per day, mostly coming from long tail searches. Obviously, the more pages indexed in Google, the higher the possibility that it will show-up on the search results. Now I’m getting additional visitors from Netherlands, China, Japan and other non-English speaking countries.
My average unique visitors per day increased from 2000 to 3000, and is now approaching the 4000 visitors per day despite being a little lazy updating this blog this month. And the earnings? Last month was an all-time high for me on Google Adsense, but it seems that this month will break the record once again.
So, do I recommend installing the Global Translator Plugin on your blog? If you want additional traffic and income, go on. Give it a try!
Update (January 17, 2009): Some languages on Global Translator Plugin are not supported by Google Adsense. You should read this post to make it fully compliant with Google Adsense TOS.
Thanks for sharing brother! I’m gonna use it. Now na. hahaha
conveythis ginagamit ko nung una. di ako satisfied. salamat sa pagpost nito. makakdagdag na ng visitors, may chance pa na lumaki kita sa adsense 🙂
thanks a lot bro!
What’s the CHMOD settings you used for the wp-content folder? Is it 777? Did you include the contents of the folder? If so, won’t this make your blog hackable?
@Fitz… it’s at 755. i don’t think it’s hackable since it’s the recommended permission settings for web servers. see this: http://www.zzee.com/solutions/unix-permissions.shtml
I installed 4 days ago the translator plugin of N2H. The translation in my blog is more delayed than yours because I set the interval to 30 minutes. I haven’t yet seen any effect in traffic because only few pages have been translated already. I have more than 2000 articles in my blog.
ma try nga!
it’s a good idea and it’s working because i’m here from my local Google search engine (ukrainian version – google.com.ua) 🙂
uh huh. thanks for the information. love it. thanks marhgil.
thanks ill try do some experiments…heheh
Since installing the plugin, I have had increased traffic from these non English readers. If you use a blog to help earn money on the net, this is a valuable tool for reaching the entire world, especially if your target market is international.
I think I already made a comment here thanking you for sharing this tool but I can’t find it now. Anyway I was impressed really and “traffic” comes to my mind and I immediately installed in two of my blogs to experiment. But instead of increasing my traffic, my SERP in Google was affected and my traffic was slashed to more than a half.
@Lito, sorry to hear about that. I just shared my experience. Others are also seeing increase in traffic. I don’t see any reason why it could affect your SERPs in Google negatively. Theoretically speaking, it should affect your SERPs positively because you’ll be adding more unique pages on your site that are linking to each other, and you’ll have more keywords possible of ranking. That’s what happened to this blog and to other blogs that are using the plugin.
Traffic decreases for many reasons, are you sure that this one is really the culprit?
@marhgil
actually I’m not sure because there are blogs I’ve seen including yours that successfully used it without problems. Maybe it was just a coincidence. I agree with your theory that many translated pages should equate to better ranking but I was wondering why It looks like that it affects by blog’s SERP. All translation engines kept banning my blog even though I set the time interval to 600 seconds. I suspect the problem is on the shared IP on my blog. My hosting provider don’t have that feature and when I looked in to your provider I saw dream host do have that feature. Do you have a unique IP ? Thanks again for your support.
@Lito… i’m on Dreamhost Virtual Private Server. I don’t have a unique IP, but the number of sites hosted on the same server is minimal (last time I checked, there is only one site I’m sharing IP with) compared to the generic shared hosting service which they tend to oversell. If you are sharing IP to many sites, that could really ban you on the google translate, specially if most of them are also using the Global Translator.
Thanks. I think that is the problem as I’ve changed the IP and tried it again and it works. Congrats nga pala dun sa pag feature sa iyo ni John Chow sa tweet this post!
thanks, this is a very good option for webmasters!
I am very glad to have found this information, especially the post about which languages are not allowed in adsense tos.
My only query with this plugin is sitemap integration, which i have been unable to achieve since installing this plugin on my site.
I had a look at your sitemap https://www.macuha.com/sitemap.xml and see you also have the same problem, the cached translated pages are not in your sitemap. But if you say the amount of pages you have indexed by google has increased, then i guess its not such a big deal and we can wait until the plugin author fixes it.
Yeah, I’m having the same problem of the translated pages not being integrated to the XML sitemap. But again, you said that you’ve got the extra traffic, so I guess it doesn’t affect much
I haven’t noticed anything yet after several days of installing it even though I have about 1365 translated posts already.
As for the AdSense, I’m still not sure whether it’s allowed. I mean, primarily the blog is in English.. I’ve posted a thread in AdSense help forum but no one replied for days yet 🙁