Increase website traffic with Google language tools
June 8th, 2007 by 
paolo The goal of this article is to show how to exploit Google imperfect translations to increase your website traffic. Disclaimer : this is only a hack and you should not use this idea in your site because search engines may not like it :P … but hack is always a good thing ;) Here you can find a sample PHP 5 Google translator API class useful ( read it if you plan to apply the idea described in this article ). Google bot indexes relevant content of each page of your website, and so each word used in your texts could be a valid keyword to be found in search engine’s results. This simply means that producing more relevant content chances to be found grow. Your site’s language is only your main language? What would happen if you translate your pages in more than one language? Simple, you’ll get more daily visitors! Using Google language tools you could translate all site’s content ( using an automated script I suggest ;) ) … but as we know that translations are imperfect and often cryptic for common humans. So… where’s the hack? Simple ! A simple script at the top of pages that performs this controls: So, search engines will index pages in your main language and in all languages generated by Google language tools and your website will appear in search engine results for a bigger set of keywords but when a visitor try to access to a page containing imperfect and no good translations he well be redirected to the page in the main language. Create a simple test site on a free hosting service to believe ;) Author: Paolo Ardoino < paolo@involutive.com > Source: ardoino.com
Original article
Posted in Google, search engines and SEO, Web | 
June 8th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Very intresting article but…
How could you be sure that I’m a real visitor rather than a bot ?
June 8th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Look at this function
function agent_is_spider($agent) { $spiders = array("googlebot", "wget", "scooter", "yahoo", "zyborg"); $res = FALSE; $agentlow = strtolower($agent); for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($spiders); $i++) { if(strpos($agentlow, $spiders[$i]) != FALSE) $res = TRUE; break; } } return $res; } if(agent_is_spider($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]) == FALSE) { .... } else { .... }It shouldn’t be so hard to print different contents depending on visitors user agents ;)
June 8th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
And the number one way to get kicked from Google is… serving substantially different content based on the user agent! That simply doesn’t fit well with Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Besides, users that come in looking for translated content will not understand the material that will be served in their foreign language - translating into useless traffic that just bounces off.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I think that often we search for something in our language for ease, but we can understand content in other languages. Obviously this tecnique isn’t good for all websites, but think at a website for developers written in german ( a language that I don’t understand ) … the most important content of that website is source code … so, the text that introduces it, translated in lot of languages, helps me to find it even if it is not in my main language.
When I visit website, I’ll be glad to see that I have found what I searched for …
Perhaps Google translation tools would make my english better ;D
June 8th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
However I wrote a note to warn all before try this hack :)
August 2nd, 2007 at 12:53 am
Dear Paolo
I have a mathematics site that has attracted subscribers from 98 countries.
Could you please visit my site and let me know what language(s) I should translate it into?
I assume I could then promote it on Google adwords in foreign languages. Or is the idea that I’ll simply get to #1 in search rankings if it’s in other languages?
Thank you!
Jonathan
http://www.whitemath.com
August 8th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Hello,
the hack here described could be used to increse your website traffic, but it will not help your pages to reach first search engine rankings.
My idea is to increase searchable keywords :)
I think that you need a site restyling instead of translation.
Try to use a CMS or a blog management system to better organize pages.
regards,
Paolo
December 10th, 2007 at 12:43 am
translating website with Google language tool can be very effective to get more sales abroad. but it never actually translate your website/web pages the way it should be in their languages. it just convert the English words to their language to make even uncomfortable. If you convert a dutch/French website to English how will you find the language? not impressive, of course but still 70% can be understood.
February 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
Infact, as I wrote, when a real user arrives on your site you can’t show him google translated pages but only the real content.
July 16th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Hey Paolo,
I think this translation idea does work well. I did implement the global translator on my wordpress blog site and within 1-2 weeks see more indexed pages in Google.
Just that sometimes Google translation service can go down. One neat feature would be to integrate this translation with Wordpress. When someone publishes a new content, it translates the content and saves the content as a post within wordpress. This way, you need not depend on the availability of the translator. Can you develop this capability?
August 2nd, 2008 at 10:10 am
Sorry, but in this period I have too much thins to complete, but
I think your idea it’s useful so I add to my TODO list ;)