[imported_silkroad]

Originally Posted by CThiessen

well, Google is very gently, the spider will not stress your Server.
On my old Server Google read between 3000 an 40.000 Pages per Day.
Now on the new Server up to 75.200 Pages per Day even without translations in the sitemap.

Christian

Hahaha

GoogleBot is not always gentle, that is only in the default setting where GoogleBot determines the crawl rate and you are lucky. If you set the crawl rate faster in your Webmaster Tools, to index faster, GoogleBot is very aggressive and GoogleBot can easily stress your server, depending on your configuration and number of users etc. If you have no or few users, then no problem. If you have thousands of users on line, the GoogleBot can slow performance significantly, especially with a high crawl rate, like 8 to 10 URLS per second.

Also, if your sitemap settings are incorrectly configured, GoogleBot will recrawl links it has already indexed; so you must set your sitemap setting so the URLs do not need to be recrawled. I recommend, for most forums, an expire time (Update Frequency) of NEVER, or at the least 1 year for posts and threads.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. We have been running translations for nearly 5 months and use sitemaps for each language. Our sitemaps with around 15 languages is around 8,000,000 URLs. I have seen millions of URLs that were already indexed dumped when the sitemap setting were set to refresh in one month. This is a very bad It takes a long time to rebuild your index after Google dumps millions (or thousands) of indexed URLs.

You must use Google Webmaster tools.

Furthermore, I strongly recommend creating a sitemap for each major language, i.e. EN, JP, ES, DE, FR, PT. etc.

Moreover, you must run Google Analytics to see how each language performs. You can set a custom report for the translated languages and easily graph how the site performs.

In other words, you must have a solid management plan to optimize performance, which includes sitemap management, Webmaster tools, and Google analytics.

Cheers.