I’m glad you like this blog, though. Thanks for commenting.

I think there’s a slightly unfair ‘perfectionist’ expectation of these translation tools in what they produce.

Like SEO, I see communication as an on-going process of how we talk to site visitors, rather than just being a one-off activity. It’s rarely 100% right first time round, but that it opens up new opportunities is something to be lauded. If it is proven that automatic translation can open up a site to new audiences (and vice-versa), then I think it demonstrates that translation by a professional could be a viable option for the future.

The quality of translation hasn’t been my foremost concern when using the WP plugin. As I mentioned previously, the biggest problem has been SEO-related rather than quality.

As a side note, I’d just like to say that I really enjoy reading your blog! I’ve been a subscriber and fairly reguluar reader for a few weeks, but it’s only the past few days that I’ve been delving a bit deeper in to some of your articles. There’s quite a bit to take in, but I feel I’ve started to touch on learning how to learn about SEO, rather than just how to parrot particular techniques!

Naturally, it’s the results that matter and will show me how much has actually sunk in, though

But it is far from perfect off course. But much better then altavista, that one really sucks.

But there other problems with languages in Europe.
For example you have the Netherlands and Belgium. The North part of Belgium (Flanders) speaks the same language. But since some time Google has made it very difficult to rank with a .be website in NL and the other way(.nl in BE).

This is a very big problem. If Dutch people look for a holiday in Belgium they all see Dutch sites(mostly affiliate sites or other indirect sites to book holidays) while the websites of the Belgiums or almost nowhere.

While that is absolute bullshit because you always had the option in Google search to search only in your country. It was there, there was absolutely no need to force it to end-users.
This measure is a big brake on the e-commerce between both countries.
And you have many neighbouring countries in Europe wich languages are very related to eachother.
Even little parts of the country have that problem. (for example there is a very small German community in Belgium who have absolutely nothing when Google.be returns them some Belgium sites written in German. They have more intrest for the German internet market.)

This is a point where Google has too little attention and experience to bring really good results. Maybe one day they could realize that Europe needs other attention points then the US.

Sorry i mentioned this but it is language related and forces webmasters to take several domains for promoting theirselves in neighbouring countries.

I had our Senior Web Designer invest a lot of time in dealing with Global Translator. I wish I could say it was a quick, clean install but I’m not sure what he did. I’ll ask him if he can find time to write about it on Best SEO Blog. He’s pretty busy right now so I would not look for a post in the near future, but I’ll see if we can work something out.

At first I was impressed with the idea of making extra content available with keywords and phrases in foreign languages without having to go to the effort and expense of rewriting content.

However, I started to run in to problems as soon as I started using it.

Unfortunately – and this is no fault of the plugin itself – pages aren’t translated immediately. If your site is crawled and happens to attempt to visit pages that have not yet been translated, then in all likelihood the page will be seen as ‘unreachable’ (at least as far as Google is concerned, anyway).

Then it also dawned on me that the plugin doesn’t translate URLs, so ‘/red-widget/’ becomes ‘/DE/red-widget/’ for the German translation. I suspect this might cause a problem for controlling which language segment of my organic search visitors gets to see the relevant page. What I mean is, so long as the translated page still has English keywords and phrases in the URL, there’s still the potential for that page to be returned in SERPs from an English-language search and be presented before the page in its original English. In fact, I know this can happen, because several of my visitors landed on translated pages, despite their languages and locations not matching. From memory, I don’t think GT translates relevant meta tags, either.

The idea behind the plugin is fantastic, however the potential for problems outweighing the benefits led me to withdraw the use of it on my site. If the problems outlined above could be addressed, I’d be back on it in a shot!