Your blog is online accessible to anyone in the world. Translating blog posts and pages increases your audience and monetization capabilities by at least ten-fold! Take advantage of the FULL global power of the Internet and learn how to translate your blog!
This is day #9 of the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days Series! Subscribe by email or RSS at the top right of any page.
I’m going to tell you about the single most important plugin that you probably haven’t used (or even thought about using) yet. This one plugin can explode the readership of your blog exponentially. This could be the definitive moment where you blog goes “global”. Imagine the possibilities of having your blog read worldwide in multiple languages and how many more people you could reach? The greatest thing about the Internet is the fact that it connects a global village through a single connection. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can read your blog.
I’ve used hundreds of WordPress plugins, and currently I think I have some 4 dozen installed. Out of all the plugins I’ve ever used I think I’ve only ever paid for two. This makes number three. WordPress is open source software that anyone can use at no cost. The greater bulk of WordPress themes and plugins (probably 98%) are also free. But there are a few plugins that are so widely used, so important, so useful, so well supported that I do not have a problem with them costing a nominal fee. Especially when you pay that fee just one time – and then future upgrades are free for life!
I’ve tried a couple free translation plugins in the past that didn’t work that well. I had one installed for 2-3 days that always seemed to produce errors instead of translations. Then it just kind of slipped my mind for a few months after I uninstalled it…that was until I installed the 404 Notifier plugin. Once installed and configured, it sends you an email every time your site generates a “404 Not Found” error. I installed it not expecting to get many emails. Then the next day I woke up and had 88 emails in my inbox. About 60 were from the 404 Notifier. Looking through them all – every single one was a URL that I had an actual (working) page for, but there was something weird at the end of each one. I saw things tacked on the end of the URL like /fr/ and /ru/ and /es/ and /de/ and then it hit me that these were languages, and those were the things added on to the URL’s when I had the the translation plugin installed.
About 90% of the “not found” errors were listed as coming from the google search crawler “googlebot”. The rest were from real users. So even though I only had the poor performing (free) translation plugin installed less than three days, google was having fits trying to index those pages and people were actually trying to access them. I knew right then and there that I had to get a translation plugin installed right away.
So, I see that you ran into the same problem that I did when it came to translation plug ins! Thanks for the awesome find!
hummm looks very good but I am in the same boat as you and have apx 40 + blogs the unlimited domains lic is $200 too much for me now
I enjoy your blog!
Hi, I’ve taken your advice and put on the translation engine. One question though…my 404 notifications have exploded. The vast majority are from bots looking for the translated version of the page. Is this something to be worried about or fixed?
Love you site btw…have got a lot of good tips to help me with the technical aspect of my site. Thanks.
Dragon Intuitives last blog post..Relationship with Religion
I have been using a translation plugin on my main sites since I got started.
brilliant plugin. The site in my title is only a one page minisite targetting a specific keyword and sending traffic to my main site. but, with the plugin it is now a 17 or 18 page site, all indexed in Google – much better!
I have used this on my http://TenerifeMortgageBroker.com site as well and have some 350 pages translated, cached and indexed on there.
Google have just updated their PR and a lot of my translated pages now have PR1 =)~ OK its not fantastic but I am quite pleased about it and I get more traffic from non-English search results now than English which is useful as I broker to all nationalities.
Probably the best type of plugin I have ever used.
Every new site is almost immediately indexed in google – hours after going live.
Can you tell I like it??!
Could you please elaborate on the translator plugin. Is there any such option for blogger hosted blogs?
try using the copy and paste code for the free google online translator, it works with any web site.
I’ve used the (free) nothing2hide plugin before and found it does a fairly decent job. It does take a few days to translate all your pages, so I guess it might also suffer from the 404 problem you describe, not that I monitored for it at the time, so can’t say for sure.
.-= Rod – Wilson Portable Tennis Ball Machines´s last blog ..Tennis Tutor ball machines =-.
I reckon the bottom line isn’t so much a technical one in terms of plug-ins and 404s, more a question of what the translations are like to a native speaker/reader. Sure, you are creating a lot more creating a lot more content for search engines to latch onto, and it’s important – as you point out – to judge whether or not translation is right for you. But machine translation isn’t perfect at the best of times – how do you know whether or not it’s making your blog or your company website look silly to foreign audiences in several languages?
.-= Mar Hampla´s last blog ..Irish roast goose recipes =-.
LOL, I have a lot of plugins installed also. I am not working on the translate ones yet. I will install the 404 Notifier plugin, that sounds like a good feature. Also if you haven’t installed it yet try the broken link plugin, I run that once every couple of days just to make sure all links work, that way I don’t have to have someone tell me.
.-= Jadeslair´s last blog ..Sniper Rifles of BFBC2 =-.