GTranslate Pro Is Too Good!!

[FerryTO]

Hi

We purchased several copies of GTranslate Pro for one of our clients and have now set them up on his domains.

Our client is delighted that in less than a week his search listings on Google have increased more than tenfold but is concerned that Googlebot may eventually penalise him.

Situation is all his domains are for the same product with each domain targeted to specific country but Google is indexing each domain for all languages and not just the one language relevant to the specific domain.

Example 1.: Their domain ferryto.jp has 690 pages but in less than three days Google has indexed 2,670 pages in multiple languages - and this is increasing virtually by the hour!

Example 2.: Their domain ferryto.com has 835 pages but in less than one week Google has indexed over 15,100 pages in multiple languages - and this is also increasing virtually by the hour!

As good as this may seem my client is happy with the ferryto.com result but only wants the Japanese language translations to be indexed on ferryto.jp as his other domains cater for the other languages.

I installed and setup GTranslate pro per your setup instruction and hence need to ask if I remove the sitemap.txt file that lists all the language sub-domains (or else only list ferryto.jp/ja in the sitemap.txt file) if this will result in Google only indexing his sites in the languages that he wants it to be indexed for.

Also thank you for the great custome service you have given us especially in settting up and problem solving server issues for us with the first purchase.

Regards

Paul

[Yana]

Hi,
Thank you for your kind words!
Please remove unwanted languages from your sitemap.txt.
Also you can write a rule in your .htaccess file to redirect unwanted languages to homepage.

[FerryTO]

Hi Yana

I have removed all reference other than the desired language from sitemaps and that worked for a while but Google is once again indexing a lot of the other languages / translations that we do not want it to index on specific domains.

Please can you advise the correct syntax of the "you can write a rule in your .htaccess file to redirect unwanted languages to homepage" we need to add to the .htaccess

Also would adding a rule to the robots.txt also perhaps prevent Google from index pages in unwanted languages?

Many thanks

Paul

[Yana]

Hi,
You can add the rules to your .htaccess. Here is an example:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(af|ar|az)/(.*)$ /$2 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(be|bg|ca)/(.*)$ /$2 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(cs|cy|da)/(.*)$ /$2 [R=301,L]