Global translator remnants

Hi, I not sure why that is happening.
I have the robots text file as above so that google has no access to them. they still to this day(!) show up, but at least they are restricted and not 404s

Did you have the same issue like me, the previosly existed urls to forward to the homepage?

You say they still show up? You mean the translated pages? How’s that possible?

Sorry, I meant Google still looks for them but since they are dissalowed in the robots file it can access them. I presume without the robot file they would come up as a long list of 404s.

no I never got the redirection problem, just a bunch of 404s until i added the file.

When you do a site search do any still show as indexed?

on site: no, they are not indexed in google at all, just show up as errors in webmaster tools. But i believe that might be a problem for my sites to rank well. Too many errors on a a site shows google that this site is neglected….At least i think that was the spirit Matt Cutts showed in one of his videos. But this is not confirmed information.

Anyway i found something else! Global Translator was doing caching on it’s own.

You should have wp-content/gt-cache directory full with it’s cached files. Exactly the same language abbreviature dirs that show up as problems. I’m deleting those as we speak and will see if it helps.

So far with the few i deleted it’s the same, they still forward to the homepage instead of 404. But i’m not sure if i have to wait a bit for this change to kick in

Here is the info from global translator settings about caching:

“Cache management

Global Translator uses a fast, smart, optimized, self-cleaning and built-in caching system in order to drastically reduce the connections to the translation engines. This feature cannot be optional and is needed in order to prevent from banning by the translation services. For the same reason the translation process will not be immediate and the full translation of the blog could take a while: this is because by default only a translation request every 5 minutes will be allowed (see next section).
The cache invalidation will be automatically (and smartly) handled when a post is created, deleted or updated.

Enable cache compression (this will strongly decrease the disk space but could give some problems on certain hosts)

Schedule a page for a new translation if it has been cached more than days ago (“0” means “never”).
Cache statistics

Your cache directory currently contains 762 successfully translated and cached pages.
Cache directory size: 19.3 MB
Your stale directory currently contains 83 successfully translated and cached pages waiting for a new translation.
Stale directory size: 1 MB”

I had removed the cache directory previously. However, just looking phpmyadmin I have found a remnant of a total cache plugin that i no longer use. It was a ‘transient’ entry which has now been deleted. I am wondering if this is possibly why google is still searching for these pages. Luckily the robot file is restricting google from doing anything, but they are still being attempted.

i deleted the gltr_preferred_languages row in mysql as well, but the urls still behave the same way

i’m out of ideas what else might be making them behave like that ??

Do you have any?

ok i just did a search for “gltr” in the DB and deleted all the records of it (all of them were in the options table) and still have the same problem.
This thing can’t be killed, omg! ??

i think the robot file with all the directories will have to always be there. I just did a site: now and there is actually STILL a /nl/ translated page, despite the robots txt. My ranking isnt affected because I always add these remnants to webmaster tools for deletion when I spot them; so do check a site: search regularly to make sure!

I would love to ask Google, what makes you still look for these pages as my restricted list gets bigger as they hunt for translated pages!

Summary:
keep the robot file FOR EVER!!
regularly do a site: to make sure none show up

Other than that there is nothing else I can think of.Good luck ??

Hmm…i think I may have given some wrong advice here re:robots txt. It looks like keeping the file in tact until Google has de-indexed the translated pages is ok but the the file must be updated by removing the directory references so that they show as 404 and then disappear.

I think if the directory references are keep for good, Google will not know they are 404, since they are being blocked, and thus they won’t die off.

I have thus removed the translated directory references from the robots file, am expecting a couple of hundred 404s, but hopefully these will then die off.

Fingers crossed, and PLEASE, if anyone has better info. I would be most grateful.

As an update I am using 410 for wordpress plugin and generating a 410 response for these directories using site/language/*(as wild card). It seems a 410 response could get the pages sorted out quicker.

references:
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wp-410/changelog/
https://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022119.html

As another update to the endless problem with this plugin; as mentioned above, once I was sure all remnants had been removed I then removed all the references to the language directories from the robots text.

This resulted in Webmaster tools ‘restricted by robots’ number to go down but my ‘not found’ to sky-rocket (to over 4000!). I left it all alone and now the ‘not found’ numbers are FINALLY dropping.

Goodbye global translator and good riddance!

Hope this helps ??