Translator Plugin Gold provides automatic machine translation of your WordPress blog in 32 languages - German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Russian, Norwegian, Brazilian Portugue, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin American Spanish, Filipino, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Swedish, Welsh, Turkish and Latin.

The new features in version 1.1 are:

1. In the option page (under Advanced -> Miscellaneous section) it now provides SQL queries which you can execute in your database to significantly speed-up Translator Pro on heavily trafficked sites. It adds indexes to the tables for faster querying.

2. Improved user interface

3. Translator Plugin Pro adds a new feature to verify completeness of translated pages by checking for keywords or tags in your page. This elegantly handles the failures in third party translation engine. This adds to the extensive checks we perform to ensure quality and completeness of translated pages.

4. New translation engine errors have been added for automatic fail-over support and load-balancing.

5. Overall performance improvement and optimizations have been added to this release.

6. New extensive documentation have been added in this release, old documentation revised and updated. You can read the full documentation here. Don’t forget to check our developer API for writing your custom look and extensions.

You can read about all the features here.

We now provide online help desk on our new support site. Please register there for customer support.

Please post your feedback in Translator Plugin Gold forum.

Translator Plugin Gold 1.1 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 as well as earlier version of WordPress.

Translator Plugin Pro provides automatic machine translation of WordPress blogs in 13+1 languages - German,Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional and optionally Norwegian.

The new features in version 5.1 are:

1. In the option page (under Advanced -> Miscellaneous section) it now provides SQL queries which you can execute in your database to significantly speed-up Translator Pro on heavily trafficked sites. It adds indexes to the tables for faster querying.

2. Improved user interface

3. Translator Plugin Pro adds a new feature to verify completeness of translated pages by checking for keywords or tags in your page. This elegantly handles the failures in third party translation engine. This adds to the extensive checks we perform to ensure quality and completeness of translated pages.

4. New translation engine errors have been added for automatic fail-over support and load-balancing.

5. Overall performance improvement and optimizations have been added to this release.

6. New extensive documentation have been added in this release, old documentation revised and updated. You can read the full documentation here. Don’t forget to check our developer API for writing your custom look and extensions.

You can read about all the features here.

We now provide online help desk on our new support site. Please register there for customer support.

Please post your feedback in Translator Plugin Pro forum.

Translator Plugin Pro 5.1 is fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 as well as earlier version of WordPress.

I recently came across an instance of Google Proxy hacking with one of my clients, which removed his index page and other pages from SERP (Search Engine Ranking & Positioning) and he lost the page ranks (went down to zero). We were asked to protect his site against Google Proxy hacking, a really dangerous technique which can not only cause you to loose page rank but also remove your pages from SERP, all because Google cannot properly identify original pages from duplicates.

Read more (353 words) »

I accidentally discovered a super-cool re-direction feature embedded in WordPress 2.3.x. Any blog may have multiple url pointing to the same blog. For example blog.taragana.com may also be accessed as www.blog.taragana.com. The proper practice, keeping SEO in mind, is to redirect all such URL to the canonical URL of the site. Now there is a simple way to achieve this.

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Imagine Company X provides a service. X is nice enough to offer it for free to education and non-profit sites. However in exchange for the generosity ACME demands that education & non-profit sites place a link on all of their pages to two of X’s main products. Would you consider that a link scheme which is in violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines? Think carefully before you answer for you may be surprised.

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Jan Dembowski uses Translator Plugin Pro for his WordPress blog, which provided him with a good traffic boost: “My web traffic went from 5,000 hits (900 visits) last week to 21,000 hits yesterday”. He made a cool & informative sidebar element with Translator API to indicate to his viewers of translated pages (only) that the page they are viewing has been translated using online services like Google or Babelfish.

Machine translation cannot equal human translation with today’s technology. However it is a simple & cheap way to provide a reasonable gist of your content for viewers who cannot understand the basic language of your blog. Not to mention that it can rapidly increase the traffic on your blog, fully ethically. His customization well manages the expectations of his non-English viewers (or viewers not conversant with the language of your blog).

Here is how he did it:

I just received version 5.01 of ATPP and it now adds the ability to check if the page is translated or not. With the inclusion of the following PHP code in your sidebar.php (or anywhere you’d like; I may change it) you can now warn your readers:

<?php if(function_exists("tgInTranslatedPage") && (tgInTranslatedPage())) { ?>
<!--skip translation-->
<div class="trans-notice">
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as <a href="http://www.google.com/translate_t">Google</a> or <a href="http://babelfish.yahoo.com/">Babelfish</a>.</p>
<?php
$original=@$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
?>
<p>The original post can be viewed <a href="<?php bloginfo(’url’);_e($original); ?>">here</a>.</p>
</div>
<!--end skip translation-->
<br />
<?php } ?>

I wrapped it in a <div> so that I can style it easily. In my style.css file I added

.trans-notice {
font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Georgia, Arial, serif;
font-size: 0.9em;
border:#ccc 1px solid;
background-color:#FAFAFA;
margin: 0 5px;
}
.trans-notice p {
margin: 7px;
}

This gives a warning in English…

Thanks for sharing this code on your blog Jan. Hope you don’t mind me quoting it.

You can read the detailed explanation of the code from his blog entry.

We can further simplify and enhance the code as follows:

<?php if(function_exists("tgInTranslatedPage") && (tgInTranslatedPage())) { ?>
<div class="trans-notice">
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as <a href="http://www.google.com/translate_t">Google</a> or <a href="http://babelfish.yahoo.com/">Babelfish</a>.</p>
<p>The original post can be viewed <a href="<?php echo tgGetTranslatedPageURL(tgGetBaseLanguage())" ?>here</a>.</p>
</div>
<!--skip translation-->
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as <a href="http://www.google.com/translate_t">Google</a> or <a href="http://babelfish.yahoo.com/">Babelfish</a>.</p>
<p>The original post can be viewed <a href="<?php echo tgGetTranslatedPageURL(tgGetBaseLanguage())" ?>here</a>.</p>
</div>
<!--end skip translation-->
<br />
<?php } ?>


The beauty of this modification is that using the API, not only you can inform your non-English viewers that they are viewing translated pages but do it in their own language as well as in English.

After few iterations this is the final code I am currently using on this blog:

<?php if(function_exists("tgInTranslatedPage") && tgInTranslatedPage()) { ?>
<div class="trans-notice">
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The original post can be viewed <!--skip translation--><a href="<?php echo tgGetTranslatedPageURL(tgGetBaseLanguage()); ?>"><!--end skip translation-->here<!--skip translation--></a><!--end skip translation-->.</p>
<!--skip translation-->
<p>Please note: This page was originally written in English.</p>
<p>The text has been translated using an online service such as <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.google.com/translate_t">Google</a> or <a rel="nofollow" href="http://babelfish.yahoo.com/">Babelfish</a>.</p>
<p>The original post can be viewed <a href="<?php echo tgGetTranslatedPageURL(tgGetBaseLanguage()); ?>">here</a>.</p>
</div>
<!--end skip translation-->
<br/>
<?php } ?>

You can see a live example in the german version of this page..

Feel free to reuse and modify this code as you please.

Sometimes I see comments where the name of the person is not really his name but a popular keyword which obviously links to his website. While I understand the need to have link-love for useful comments and even encourage it, the name field shouldn’t be abused by using keywords like “Web Banner Design”, for example. They are for the name of the person and should be used as such only.

Read more (212 words) »

I noticed something funny with this site’s statistics. On average people are spending 4 minute 8 seconds on the site. That has to be good, right? However the bounce rate is hovering at 70% according to Google Analytics. What does both these figures translate to?

Any suggestion in improving the bounce rate or increasing the average time on site are welcome.

Update: I drilled-down in the bounce rate data and realized something extremely encouraging. My bounce rate is primarily from search engine traffic. I expect, nay hope, that the bounce rate from search engine traffic be higher for obvious reasons.

Compete is a relatively new player in website ranking and third party analytics, a space dominated so far by Alexa rankings and Google PageRank. Whereas Google PageRank is an approximate ranking for a single page, Compete rankings are, like Alexa, for the entire site and they offer it for free. In my initial analysis compete is far more accurate than Alexa. The other major players in this market are: comScore Media Metrix 2.0, Hitwise and Nielsen//NetRatings. Compete can be a very useful tool for web advertisers and venture capitalists. It allows independent assessment of sites to help estimate their advertisement potential as well as overall business potential (for web based businesses).

Compete is the brainchild of Bill Gross, a serial entrepreneur who previously started search engine GoTo which became Overture which pioneered the business of paid search, and was later acquired by Yahoo.

How does Compete measure the web traffic?

Compete estimates site traffic and engagement metrics based on the daily browsing activity of over 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users. Compete applies a rigorous normalization methodology, leveraging scientific multi-dimensional scaling (by age, income, gender and geography) to ensure metrics are representative of the U.S. Internet population. Compete members are recruited through multiple sources, including ISPs, the Compete Toolbar and additional opt-in panels to ensure a diverse distribution of user types and to facilitate de-biasing across the data sources.

Read more (664 words) »

Translator Plugin Pro for WordPress blogs provides automatic machine translation of your blog in 14 languages* - English, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional. It is fully customizable with PHP API & tags. One of the frequent requests is how we can provide only links to translated pages without the associated country flag images. Here’s is a full example how you can easily do it with the API. Please include the following code in your template to use it.

<!--skip translation-->
<?php
if(function_exists('tgGetVisibleLanguages')) { // This ensures that the Translator plugin is active.
    $visibleLanguages = tgGetVisibleLanguages();
    echo '<ul>';
    foreach($visibleLanguages as $language) {
        echo "<li><a href='" . tgGetTranslatedPageURL($language) . "' title='" . tgGetTooltip($language) . "'>" . tgGetTooltip($language). "</a></li>";
    }
    echo '</ul>';
}
?>
<!--end skip translation-->

Feel free to customize the code to your needs. Let me know if you have any questions. You can find the full details about the API here.

*Note: Translator Gold provides translation in 32 different languages.