Miscellaneous Hacks - vB Global Translator - Multiply your indexed pages & put search traffic on autopilot

vB Global Translator

Note - There are 2 versions of this script depending on your setup. This script is compatible with users running standard vBulletin and vBSEO only and all vB release versions. If you cannot install this I am more than happy to answer support questions.

So what does this do?

vB Global Translator automatically translates your forum into 28 other languages via the Google translate API, stores those translations in a MYSQL database then rewrites new URLs so you end up with 28 new pages for every current page.

So, if you have 10,000 pages, this MOD will translate those pages into 28 languages making a total of 280,000 pages in 28 languages. This results in a flood of international traffic and referrals from the search engines. If you are getting 1,000 visits a day from your 10,000 pages imagine how many referrals you will get from 280,000 pages!

The current languages this MOD works with are all supported by AdSense so you can expect your income to rise accordingly. I have this running on a 20,000 page forum and after a few months I have more than doubled my search engine traffic.

How do I Install?

Note - Please make sure you have CURL enabled on your server, it will be listed in you php.ini file. If in doubt ask your host.

First download the relevant package below for your setup.

Next you need to add a new MySQL database to your domain to store the translated pages. Open the database in phpmyadmin or similar and import the db.sql file to install the database tables. Once you have done that you need to select the 'wt_cache' table on the left then 'operations' from the top menu and change the storage engine to InnoDB, then click Go.

Add your new database details to translate.php then, if your forums base language is different to English, change your country code. Otherwise ignore this step.

Find:

REMOVED

Change en to:

REMOVED

Next save translate.php and upload that, translateflags.php and overloadcache.txt to your forum root, so if your forums are in a /forums/ folder upload these files there. Upload the flags folder to your domain root, thats the domain root.

CHMOD overloadcache.txt to 777

In your vBulletin admin panel add a new plugin with the following settings.

Hook Location: global_complete
Title: vB Global Translator
Execution Order: 5
Plugin PHP Code:

REMOVED

Save the plugin and activate.

In your vBulletin admin panel add another new plugin with the following settings.

Hook Location: global_start
Title: vB Global Translator Flags
Execution Order: 5
Plugin PHP Code:

REMOVED

Save and activate.

Finally add the code below to your template so the flags to select languages appear. This is typically the header, navbar or footer so that they display on every page.

REMOVED

Load Issues:

This script is can be quite server intensive for large sites. As you are adding links to all of these new pages from all of your current pages the search engine bots will crawl these 1,000's of new pages fast. As the MySQL trys to deal with the many, many translations and querys I have seen my server load spike a bit.

To combat this we have written in a condition that if server load is more than 1.5, the cache setting will disable and pages will be read live from the Google API and no database writing will take place.

If you feel this setting too high/low you can change it by finding the variable below in translate.php and editing accordingly. The only reason to change this is if - A) You are on a slow server and it is overloaded/crashing or B) You have a very fast server and it can handle more, this will mean your site will get fully cached faster resulting in faster page load times when people re-visit the translated pages.

if(floatval(getServerLoad()) >= 1.5)

One final thing to remember is while your site is being cached and data written to the new database read access times to already cached pages may vary. Uncached pages need to be translated and this can take time when translating a fresh page. Cached pages may load fast or slow depending on whether your server is under load or not as when under load read access from the database is disabled. You just need to be patient and wait until your site is fully cached which will vary between site size, server spec and how often search bots crawl your pages.

Please rate and click install

THANK YOU!

Version History:

v1.7

* Removed ioncube encryption to bring script inline with vBulletin.org rules

v1.6

* Fixed nofollow block on flag links for users with vbseo sites
* Fixed adsense ads showing for translation services etc. by adding section targeting ignore tags

v1.5

* Fixed database speed issues by using InnoDB instead of MyISAM
* Code encrypted with ioncube

v1.0

* Script base version

[Dave Hybrid]

Originally Posted by tansu

My load averages are: 1.33, 1.53, 1.58

Hmm, ok, seems some have issues and some dont, mysql seems to overload on some servers. We are looking into it. Will update shortly.

[Geraldm]

Originally Posted by Dave Hybrid

It should be in your vB admin CP homepage under - Quick Administrator Links

Ah ok found it .... it says:
Server Load: 2.16 (2 cpus)

Server Load Averages: 3.71 2.80 2.52

I would expect this to be normal and would very rarely go below the set threshold of 1.5 as defined in your plugin...

Should I increase the threshold to something like 2.5? Is that advisable?

[Dave Hybrid]

If you are constant above 1.5 then the script will work but pages will not be cached.

You can increase it to say 2.5 and caching will work, but server load will increase more, so 3 may be a better option.

If it has a negative effect, like the site gets very slow then let me know.

[nascimbeni]

I solved a previous error ( php had to be upgraded to 5.2 ) -
Now however I have this message when I activate the plug in
"The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression."

[Calash]

Originally Posted by Dave Hybrid

What is you current serverload? and did you CHMOD 777 the cache file?

The load setting on the script means if server load is x then cache is disabled. If you already have a high load it will be disabled and no db writing will happen, get you load down or up the setting to something above what your load is. Be careful though as upping the setting will put even more load on your server. Are you on shared hosting? Might be time for an upgrade.

Yes to shared hosting and I am not going to be upgrading just for a single modification. If it is incompatible with a shared host then I am going to uninstall for now.

Thanks, it looks to be a very well done modification

[Dave Hybrid]

It is very MySQL intensive, some servers have an issue with this, we are working to narrow down the cause. We may need to release a upgrade or it may be a simple case of server spec. We're still testing.

[nascimbeni]

Dave
Did you see my posting ( a copy below ) -
I have this message when I activate the plug in
"The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression."

PS I am on a dedicated server

[Dave Hybrid]

Also you say you wont upgrade for one mod. If your traffic doubled overnight and loaded your server would you not upgrade? Because this is what this mod will do in the long run anyway...

[Dave Hybrid]

Originally Posted by nascimbeni

Dave
Did you see my posting ( a copy below ) -
I have this message when I activate the plug in
"The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression."

PS I am on a dedicated server

To be honest I'm not sure, I dont think the script likes subdomains as I said before, sorry.

[Geraldm]

Originally Posted by Dave Hybrid

To be honest I'm not sure, I dont think the script likes subdomains as I said before, sorry.

I'm running it on a subdomain (forums.mydomain.com) just fine... apart from the mysql errors