Need Your Advice On Automatic Translation Software For Authority Sites

A few months back I toyed with the idea of having our authority site translated into around 20 languages and went through the motion of ordering gtranslate.net's Enterprise solution:

http://gtranslate.net/features

I ended up installing it and setting up the DNS zones etc for the subdomains (http://ja.XXXX.com) and at first it looked really good, everything was translated VERY fast and Google seemed to love it, indexing the pages VERY fast. Then a few days later (3-4) i noticed that our traffic dropped a little and our SE impressions started to drop and it started to de-index some translated pages that it indexed just a few days before. I put this down to that it was a Google translation of the website and in fact it was doing us harm. I have heard that Google doesn't like having static versions of its translations (especially if they were translated via Google which i think gtranslate use) and considers them to be duplicate content.

4 months on and i keep checking our pages indexed in Google for other reasons and the translated subdomains always seem to appear high in the results even though they havent been live for 4 months... Why would Google still index a page it supposedly hates 4 months after we removed the page?

It just doesn't make sense to me and i'm now questioning if the drop we experienced over the 4 days was down to something else.

I really want to get our website translated into 20+ languages since we serve a global audience and English language only accounts for something like 20% of our industry. I've looked into getting every page manually translated but the site is 1,000 articles strong and we're adding 10 unique articles per day so manual translation cost just go through the roof.

What would you guys suggest? The last thing i want to do is to install it again and for it to stunt our growth since we're growing VERY fast and rankings and traffic are shooting up.

So i guess my question is, has anyone had experience with gtranslate on authority sites, good or bad? Or does anyone know for sure (with case study) that google doesnt like the translations? If not gtranslate, any other automatic translation service?

if i cannot find an answer from our brilliant community then i think i might create a micro portal with only 20 pages, translate the whole thing and keep a very close eye on the results but im hoping someone on here has done the same thing before?

Sorry if this post is rushed, i have a huge amount of work to do but really appreciate your replys

Hi,

I think you should check for another reason. I know many sites using GTranslate and they don't have problems with Google or any other search engines. It is a myth that Google can detect that you have a automatically translated version of a site. It seems that GTranslate itself is using their own solution and after checking their indexes it doesn't seem that they have problems with Google.

Hope this helps!

I think automatic translation and authority site don't fit together. Even if the content will rank, do you think it will convert? I mean when I see a garbage content on a site I click the close button asap.
I've seen a couple manually translated websites. They do not translated all content. I don't know what you are selling, but you could do keyword research in other languages and translate only the main posts and rank the. 5 years ago it has worked for me well))

Kn9Isler said:

I think automatic translation and authority site don't fit together. Even if the content will rank, do you think it will convert? I mean when I see a garbage content on a site I click the close button asap.
I've seen a couple manually translated websites. They do not translated all content. I don't know what you are selling, but you could do keyword research in other languages and translate only the main posts and rank the. 5 years ago it has worked for me well))

Click to expand...

Sorry, i didn't see that you replied to the thread.

I know what you mean, it almost goes against the aim of an authority site but ive just checked again and Google seems to still love them. Most of the translated homepages are still indexed and have been dead for SO LONG now.

Why wouldn't they auto remove them from their index.

Surely they must like them. I see loads of people using Google translate to view our pages so this would help the visitor too.

Yes i do think it will convert, not at the same rates but surly even 1 extra conversion is worth it.

The site is doing really well in the SERPS and rising so i don't want to risk getting a penalty when its doing so well but on the flip side its a global market and im limiting myself just to the

Does anyone know of any large sites that use the same kind of translation?

I'm hitting so many brick walls at the moment with this so ive decided to do some split testing.

Ive decided to buy the foreign tld's of our big portal and use gtranslate to translate them. I'm hoping that since they will be on seperate domains that if google flops any penalties out it won't affect the mother ship.

I'm also going to launch a new portal that we're just finishing the content for now (about 100 pages) and then im going to test it with gtranslate and see if i can see a bigger proportion of foreign traffic coming through than the mothership.

If anyone is interested in seeing the outcome let me know, if not then i won't bother. This thread seems dead ever since i opened it