GTS Blog

Worldingo is a pioneer in the field of online translation. Worldlingo was the first company to sell online translation services powered by machine translation. This included email translation, website translation and text translation. Worldlingo was also the company that powered text translation in early versions of Microsoft Office, before MS started to use their own MT. Worldlingo was the first company that powered translations on the EU Patent website, Espacenet. Due to this prowess in the field of automatic translation, Worldlingo owned the SERP rankings for years. Worldlingo came up in the top 3 in pretty much every search query done in Google and the other search engines.

Worldlingo initially used Systran Enterprise Server version 5 software for their translations. In 2009, Worldlingo switched MT suppliers and started to use Language Weaver software. This allowed them to add many more languages. It also helped boost traffic to their website.

But something bad happened to Worldlingo in March 2011: they lost over 60% of their Internet traffic overnight. The Alexa chart below needs no analysis, it speaks for itself.

Worldlingo Alexa ranking 2011

Why did this happen? The answer is simple: Google downgraded Worldlingo, pushing them much lower on the SERPs. Search engine traffic tanked and Worldlingo has yet to recover.

Why did Google downgrade Worldlingo? I think I have an answer to that too. At the end of 2009, Worldlingo came up with a ‘great’ idea. They created a vast Multilingual Archive by translating millions of Wikipedia articles using machine translation (read more about it here). Google got wind of this and penalized Worldlingo. The decision made by Worldlingo to machine translate and index millions of Wikipedia pages has cost them dearly.

The bottom line: you can mass translate non-original content with MT, as long as you don’t infringe any copyrights, and get away with it for a while. But eventually the search engines will catch on and penalize your site. Machine translating your own website is another matter. This is usually not a massive amount of content and all of the content is original. The best solution from an SEO perspective is to translate your content professionally. If you need to use MT to translate your content, try to post-edit it for enhanced clarity and to avoid SEO damages. If you have a WordPress website, you can use our GTS Translation plugin for post-editing machine translation and get good results.

The Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning – or “semantics” – of information on the Internet. You can read more about it here. This goes way beyond language recognition. It is the ability to understand the meaning of content. One of the basic applications of the semantic web is Sentiment analysis, or opinion mining. Another application is text generation: semantic web software can automatically generate human quality text from a database.

You can read more about the tools they are developing from the Syllabs API documentation. A brief summary of these tools:

• Language detection: this is a pretty standard feature which Syllabs offers
• Text extraction: mine pure content from the Internet while stripping pages of ads, menus, footers
• Named entity extraction: semantic tagging of content to identify named entities such as locations, names of persons, names of organizations
• Related keywords: find keywords for SEO based on linguistic analysis
• Sentiment Analysis

Syllabs is part of the TTC initiative which is funded by the EU. In addition to this funding, Syllabs has a number of commercial product offerings in a SaaS model.

Dr. de Loupy was kind enough to provide an online demo of two of the API features. continue reading…

I had the opportunity to attend the Sphinconn 2011 SEO conference in Jerusalem this week. Sphinconn was a one-day conference which was organized by a very nice guy named Barry Schwartz, who is the Executive Editor of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land.

All in all it was a good conference with good speakers from several countries. Obviously, most of the speakers were from Israel but there were also SEO experts from the UK, USA and Europe. I spotted a few Googlers in the crowd that sported some spiffy T-shirts. Human networking was very good: there were lots of timely breaks which gave you the opportunity to talk to some interesting and knowledgable people. The computer networking however sucked!!! The Internet did not work for most of the day. The Tweeters got bored and I noticed a few people who experienced withdrawal symptoms. If I was Barry’s shoes I would have kicked some asses for letting me down so badly.

Here are some of my impressions learned from the conference:

Google. Google, Google. Most of the speakers discussed how to get page ranking on Google. Very little information on other search engines was provided.

Matt Cutts, Matt Cutts, Matt Cutts. Since Google was so dominant, the most widely quoted and cited person at the conference was Google’s SEO king Matt Cutts. Long live the king!

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. There were lots of talks on the value of Facebook as an SEO tool. Since I am not really on Facebook I did not pay too much attention. But clearly SEO mavens are focusing on Facebook as both a tool for advancing SEO on Google and Bing and also as an emerging ad platform which will steal some of Google’s thunder.

The ever elusive one-handed SEO expert. US President Harry Truman once said: Give me a one-handed economist. All my economists say, ‘on the one hand…on the other.‘ The same can be said about SEO people.

SEO is stuck in a time warp. Should you buy text links (or will Google penalize you)? Should you trade links? Should you blog? How to follow the competition’s links. When excessive linking is considered search engine spam. What is the best form of anchor text. These and other issues which were discussed by conference panelists are as old as SEO itself. And every question raised by conference delegates usually got 2-3 different answers. Which leads me to my blog post title: nobody really knows the truth. I’m not even sure that Matt Cutts knows himself, or if he is disclosing the entire truth. One of the people at the conference said that Mr. Cutts is the master of deception, since Google doesn’t want anybody to get too savvy about their bread-and-butter search engine.

In summary, the conference was a success and provided a good ROI for the time and money spent. Lots of valuable information was dispensed, and if nothing else allowed the delegates to hone their SEO skills and get some new ideas.

One of the greatest things about blogging, from an SEO perspective, is in the keyword ranking you can get from a good blog post. Blog content is much more dynamic than website content: blogs are usually updated more frequently than websites and fresh content is added on a more steady basis. Search engines like that and tend to reward a good blog post with a high position on the SERP. You can easily keep track of your popular blog posts using an analytics tool and see how these posts rank for various keywords.

Now here’s the part which is even better. Once you see the keywords a blog post is ranking high for and which keywords provide the entrance to that blog post, you can adjust the text to get your sales message out in the most effective manner. Like telling people what they can order from your company and by adding a contact point where readers can buy what they are looking for.

I’ll give you an example from my own GTS blog: last October I published a blog post entitled: Need to translate a PDF file? Google Translate does it for you. This post was read well over 1,000 times and is read by an average of 30 different people a day. But more importantly it has a top 10 Google ranking for ‘pdf file translation’ and ‘translate pdf file.’ These and other keywords are driving the traffic to my blog post. By adding a sentence that tells my readers that GTS can provide translation of PDF files into many languages, and by providing a link to our company website which provides further details, I will get this message out to hundreds of readers who will read the blog post in the coming weeks. And some of those readers may (and probably will) ask for price quotes. Will any of the price quotes turn into sales? It is a safe assumption to say YES.

So remember, blogging is good but selling your service is even better. Now you can do both at the same time.

What’s the biggest excuse for not starting a blog? And what’s the answer you most often hear when you ask a blogger why they don’t post more often? In my experience the answer invariably leads to: “I don’t have time to write blog posts,” or “I have nothing to blog about.” Both of these are lame excuses. Here are some tips which will get your creative juices flowing and kick-start your blog with excellent new content.

The title is the most important component of a blog post. Write a catchy title and people will want to click and read more. Write a boring title and people will skip you every time. It’s all about how you package your content.

I am not going to provide a mini-workshop on title writing (I could probably use one myself). But just ask yourself a simple question before you write your next blog post: what do your readers want to read? What topics interest them? If the title of the post you are working on sounds boring, then either (a) scrap the post or (b) think of another way to package your information. Try not to publish blog posts with uninteresting titles. Look at some of the well-known newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post. See how they phrase the titles and try to emulate the tricks that they use. These guys are pros at writing catchy titles.

Start to develop your blog posts from the title down. Even if you don’t have the content yet, if you can come up with an interesting title, write it down first and then start pouring content into it. The title is the blueprint of your blog post and will determine its content.

Here is an idea. Do some brainstorming and come up with 3 or 4 interesting blog post titles you yourself would be interested in reading. Create a draft for each title in your blogging platform. In the next few days, add content to those blog posts until you feel they are ready to be published. By having your next few posts in your arsenal, you will be able to publish on a daily basis. If you do this once a week, you will never run out of new content and your blog will be flowing with great new content all the time! New readers will come and traffic to your blog will flourish.

My next post in this series will be: 10 ideas for your next blog post