Hey there, I have a large site with around 70,000 pages and last July I set about the large task of trying to translate them all into 8 languages in order to provide foreign surfers with a better experience and get the foreign pages listed in the search engines. This was done in July 2010 All pages templates were translated and where possible content. However if content could not be translated then it was removed from foreign pages. however important information like the page title and outgoing link. I know it sounds stupid however I have had pages with little content perform well previously with just the default template. Anyway first huge disaster, the new foreign templates went live and I had not fully translated all templates and even worse page titles or meta descriptions! hellloooo dupe content, I got hit heavily and many pages ended up being duplicated. So I then quickly blocked the foreign templates in robots.txt and added /fr /es /de /it /pt /ru /jp It turned out my server did not even accept russian or Japanese charachters so I did not even both translating so I have since permanently redirected them. Any I do all translations for French and unblock. Well traffic is still low and has been declining slowly since July 2010. In July 2011 I finally finish rest of translations and because traffic is so slow I say pffft and just unblock the other directories except /ru /jp and well they seemed to have been indexed but traffic is still going down further and further. I do not know what to do? What do you suggest please? I wish I had never bothered with translations in the first place now. For example this time last year I was at 15,000 uniques a day and now only 5,000 uniques a day yet more pages are indexed. I run a sitemap but for 70,000 pages X 5 languages it does not work. So I only submit default pages. I admit 100% I have messed up big time and I want to fix it badly and go back to the old days of 15k a day. What do you suggest I do? 1) Remove all foreign pages. Just leave it like that 2)Remove all foreign pages, permanently redirect to original pages. 3)Keep as it is, problem will fix itself now that I have unblocked everything and templates have translations. (do nothing) 4) Keep everything as it is, block robots accessing foreign pages? 5)alcoholism? I love my site want want to see it back to the top again.
Translating all those 70k pages might have been a real tedious process at first and i am sure you have invested some good bucks into that. now, i wonder why you didn't just put translate.Google.com buttons on your home page instead of bothering with all this?. still, i would say you should go with option #2. Remove all foreign pages, permanently redirect to original pages.
The major question is "are those 5 foreign languages" translated manually ? If yes, go to option 3 and monitor for another two weeks If no, go back to the initial, remove all of them
Pretty wrong for you is to make this implementation for all your pages, don't you tried a trial for few pages only and see what could be Google's response? Unless you removed and un-indexed those duplicate pages, your site will continuously suffer. Avoid redirects if necessary, just remove them instead.
because I am an idiot. I thought doing this would create more unique pages thus = $$$ obviously i could not have been more wrong. I created custom translater programming and did myself manually via translate.google.com thanks. Should I set old pages to 410? or just permanent redirect 301 yes? Thanks mate They were transalted manually yes, by me, however not manually in the sense I used a dictionary and my own knowledge I used translate.google.com. So if i think I am under the "if no" category. and if no. Remove them all how? 404? 410 and 301 redirect, what do you suggest. thanks mate. again i am an idiot and need my head checking sometime. so you are saying 410 and not a permanent redirects(301)? I do have some users who have already bookedmarked the foriegn pages and some links to them, although a very small number. please could you elaborate? thanks mate. Programmer will work on this on Monday. I will check back tomorrow (Sunday) to see further opinions. once again I am going through a bad time with this website and thankyou all very much for your help. I want to do well.
Do you need help with your website Russian content? If you ever do, my wife is Russian, so I thought I would advise you. She can help you out if you need, also Ukrainian translations or content = <a href="http://www.DenverRussian.com" alt="denver russian tutor"</a>
hehe is this a spam bot or not ? I am not sure. but no thanks, Ive had enough of translations for now. thanks. Any update to my questions by the way guys? I speak to the programmer tomorrow.
I would suggest you remove all other pages and doing redirect, if you need other language site you can simply put a google translate bar on your home page.
What do you mean by server not accepting Russian characters? Can I see your russian version, please? You can message me...
Just buy different domains for the pages and you should be out of trouble. Get proper domain names for the relevant pages and set up your meta tags to attract visitors from different places. I have always found that multilingual languages do not work very well. Better to come up with individual websites for each target market.
i agree with gb-translation, use different domains, multilinguage 70 000 pages will ever be a seo and management pain
i think removing the foreign pages permanently is the perfect solution . i don't think its much helping. so why keeping them?
First off if you remove all the translated pages, one by one wait a few weeks and see if it improves, then you may be able to identify to problem and know how to fix it
410 is not a redirect, it is a server response code to state that the URI/URL/Page is Gone. Just use 301 redirect
I 301 all pages traffic dropped 10% now 2 weeks and still the same any advice? my number of pages indexed has dropped a lot which is good i guess. google crawl errors and html suggestions also down but no increase in that traffic.
I would now obsess about it. These things happen with google and other search engines. If you made changes to rectify things or improve your SEO, it is normal for google to take about a month until you see the effects.
Yes, good luck now, as I said, give it a month or so and then come back to let us know if things are good or not.