We’re moving over 11,000 pages of content, translated with over 104 languages around the world. Many of the pages in GTranslate.io were not indexed. They have recommend only to translate to 10 language or only languages that your visitors use. So, there are a few major issues that need to be fixed:
- Non-indexed translated pages
- Automatically redirecting translation pages
- Re-index the pages that we want to rank
- Get traffic through translation for SEO
To remove the pages from Google, we would have to take the following steps:
- Remove those redirect codes for GTranslate in hosting
- Redirect each 104 lang directory to main url or directory
- Disable or change all ad campaigns urls with multi-language
- Update the Robots.txt to exclude subdirectories of language
- Request removal from search which will increase crawling of TLD
The main issue to consider is that the client is getting traffic from all countries and they are receiving converting customers from these posts as well:
Further, the languages most used are as follows:
So, we need to keep translations, but it needs to be quality driven and scalable for the client without triggering the Google SPAM update of 2024.
We can implement a new translation plugin within the same directories. This would allow us to locally host the content. You can also try to translate the pages external and publish posts.
But, here we have a new opportunity – we can redirect the directories to other TLD domains. Then, host those domains on the same server, pointing them to the same IP address. This would allow us to translate the website over several times while keeping all the content on one website.
If you do this for 10-20 of the top languages, you can potentially keep the majority of the traffic. Additionally, if the content is hosted locally, then you can update and manually proof read the content for a higher quality experience.
In short, here’s a summary of outcomes:
- Fix the automatic redirection of traffic – restore all traffic or stay at 1 click per day
- Remove the translation content from index – lose traffic and gain only in English countries
- Move pages to TLD domains with better translation – gain traffic, get new domains ranking
The TLD option is the only option that really allows us to move forward.
In the Google Forums, we discovered a few other sites who lost traffic:
They also had translation pages and some issues:
Another website did get banned and they were using WPML:
In this case, the site had over 2400 pages and was using WPML for translation.
Given these sites both had directories, it may be advantageous to move directly to TLD domains to keep content separate and non-repetitive. Additionally, this will help rather than doing subdomains for local regions and traffic performance.
It may be worth waiting a couple of days to see if the redirect solves the issue or if google fixes this massive update and impact on translation content.
Action Steps
As a first step, we’re removing 60+ languages that are not indexed. And, we’ll remove another 30+ languages that are indexed, leaving 10-20 languages indexed.
We’ll use the content removal prefix in GSC:
And you can update the robots.txt file to stop the indexing too.
Additionally, update the sitemaps on the website, updated the sitemap on Google Search Console, and updated google via forums.
As a result, we have the following fixed:
- Dropped sitemap pages from 300 to 205, of these most 170 are single posts
- Requested fixed pages in Google Search Console
- Fixed the automatic redirect for visitors