Awesome and I understand, Thanks :up:

First of all, I would like to thank Dave for such an awesome mod. This mod is truly inspirational. Thank you!!

Second of all, for those who have posted in this thread and harassed Dave about this mod, I want to say, "What is wrong with you?!" Dave is a lot more patience than I would have been with the fear-mongers and nay-sayers who toss rocks at his code (which is hard work! and free!) ! I think folks who get this mod up and working, and more traffic to their site, should PayPal some serious coin his way (that includes me).

Third, translation of a page of unique content is not duplicate content. There is nothing in Google's TOS that says translation of one page of unique content is bad in any way. In fact, to translate one page of unique content to the other is a service to people all over the planet! If you have good unique content in EN, for example, it is good to make that content available in SP, or JP or CN, for example. Dave deserves a seat at the UN, for finding a way to do this :-) This is good for everyone and good for Google too.

Forth, I have a few questions because I have not installed this yet because we have about 400,000 (English) URLs in our Google sitemap. 400K * 28 is over 11 Million URLs, so I am a bit worried about server load and performance on this new install.

So I was thinking to simply only translate one language at a time, say EN to SP. From reading the posts here, this seems easy enough by commenting out all the other flags, going slow at first.

Our database is already a kinda large, nearly 180 MB Gzipped for backup, so this will grow quite big with so many languages, so I think better to start small and work our way up, based on the size of the user base. According to this link, Top 10 World Internet Languages, we should do Chinese after English, followed by Spanish and then Japanese (see attached) to reach the large "Internet Audiences". I don't think I will translate minor languages from small language-Internet populations anytime soon, and will prioritize, unless Dave advises otherwise.

Also, we use vBSEO (of course!). So thanks for all the great posts on vBSEO regarding this mod.

In closing this post, I would like to again thank Dave for coming up with a way to translate vB posts (etc) to other languages so people who are searching for information can find that content. I have a few more questions, but this post is getting too long!

Thank you so much, kudos to you, someone who understands the project and it's goals. It's also nice to finally get some good feedback, this is truly a great mod and the single, most effective way of gaining huge amounts of traffic in a matter of weeks. Thanks again for your post, makes this feel a little more worthwhile.

You are welcome. I just installed it (vbseo install on 3.7.x) and it is working fine. I did not comment out any languages -- will just see how it goes.

I did notice that the URLs were not rewritten for the Flags. Is there some code to rewrite those URLs optimized for SEO?

They are rewritten, just like vbseo, they just have a query on the end...

If you want to convert them to a directory format you'll need to play with htaccess.

I didn't do this as it makes no difference seowise and making one htaccess fit 100's of users setups is impossible.

Thanks.

Oh! Thanks. I thought it made a difference to have a query (?) in the URL, but I am no SEO expert. I will defer to you, since you have been running this for so long!

I'll just leave things as the are (not change the sitemap generation either for now) and see what happens.

Installed and thanks for the great work.

The URLs here at vb.org have ? querys, every standard vb forum has them, they make no difference at all except some say rewritten URLs look pretty, that's it, no seo value at all.

It's the long strings and pages that have multiple string for the same content you have to avoid like ww.domain.com/community/?sid=d161fcfbd7d2d99ef36fe89b5732c5ce

I was so excited when the flags came up, i thought I was finished. Sadly I get a "Cannot connect" error and it mentions syntax in line 4 by the ")". I figure i am doing something stupid, can you point me in the right direction?

It works on many other forums, individual issues are almost always the install not being followed properly. So go over that, again, and again. Also, without a url, I cant do anything.