Need URL Rewriting Help - vBulletin Translation Mod

Ok first of all let me say that I am aware that discussion on the vBulletin modification called Global Translator has been closed. A new mod called vBulletin Enterprise Translator has come to take its place and with it I hope I can do my part and help the author create a mod that is more inline with vBSEO and Google standards. I was the one who wrote the code to send an API key from google along with translation requests and I want to help more.

The link for vBulletin Enterprise Translator is here:
vB Enterprise Translator - vBulletin.org Forum

I understand that the consensus of the vBSEO guys was that the mod went against the link consensus principle and did some other bad SEO things.

What I am currently trying to do is rewrite my urls from the old format of www.website.com/page.html?hl=LANG to www.website.com/LANG/page.html

You may say that this has been proposed before and the issue is that english language pages would have to be changed to the format: www.website.com/en/page.html but I do not agree that this has to be so.

I am sure there is a way to make all of the translated pages(for example, danish) be like this: www.website.com/da/page.html while retaining the english language as www.website.com/page.html

Up until now I have been trying to do this with some simple mod_rewrite rules like so:

Code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(..)/(.*)$ $2?hl=$1 [L,QSA]

What this code does is check and see if the directory in the beginning of the url is two characters, if it is and the URI doesn't correspond to any real file or directory, then it will rewrite the url with the "hl" variable and append any other variables.

I have rewritten these rules so many times trying different flags like N and no flags at all but without the L flag it doesn't seem to work at all. This doesn't make sense to me because I have other rewrite rules that rewrite things like videos.html to index.php?page=videos and those rules are still executed even though they are AFTER the language rules.

Even though the rules do no make sense, they seem to be working. The issue I am having is that this approach is working fine with NON-VBSEO urls, but if it is any url that VBSEO rewrites, like a showthread url, VBSEO will take the LANG part of the url out and the translation does not happen.

I have been looking through the vbseo code for a while but unfortunately I cannot seem to find the place where this rewriting takes place.

What I want to do is have vbseo rewrite these urls properly with the LANG portion intact for translated pages while retaining the ORIGINAL url rewriting format for english pages.

I know I shouldn't expect any official support for this problem but I was hoping there is somebody out there that can show me the path

Hi T2x,

Thanks for this thread.

First of all, I agree that translated pages of original content is not considered duplicate content and hence, does not break the vBSEO concept of "link consensus" and our results show the same. We have only seen positive SEO results, in practice. I also acknowledge that the vBSEO team disagrees. However, there is no reason to close customer threads when customers disagree with the vBSEO team. We have "big boards" too, are paying customers, and know the results we see with SEO on our sites, so I hope the team will support us, in practice. I hope there will be no debates of unproven theory or opinions in this thread, only customer support.

Second, to manage the issue of what to do with the "en" aspect of any possible translation to English, we simply 301 these ?lang=en back to the main pages. This seems to work perfectly.

As far as any concerns about Google's TOS, I suggest folks:

(1) Refresh their 15 day old translation entries, if they are concerned about a "15 day cache claus".

(2) Insure they use the API key (thanks for writing that upgrade)!

(3) Add a "Language Translations by Google" credit to each translated page or at the footer of the entire site.

In other words, there are simple work arounds and upgrades that insure any translation mod meets the providers TOS. It is also possible to use machine API translation services other than Google, BTW. We have a colleague who uses a different one (forgot the name).

Regarding, rewriting ... link.html?lang=flag, you might be able to gain some performance and ease of coding if you manage the "language directory" part of the SEO problem in configuration options, versus have a RewriteRule for file and directory.

It seems to be that:

Code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

could be server intensive and maybe overkill, since this check can be a configuration option versus done is mod_rewrite.

Cheers.

Originally Posted by reborg

Regarding, rewriting ... link.html?lang=flag, you might be able to gain some performance and ease of coding if you manage the "language directory" part of the SEO problem in configuration options, versus have a RewriteRule for file and directory.

It seems to be that:

Code:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

could be server intensive and maybe overkill, since this check can be a configuration option versus done is mod_rewrite.

Cheers.

vBSEO uses that code so I'm sure it's not THAT server intensive. It shouldn't be an issue anyway because what I am looking to do is a code modification within vBSEO's url rewriting engine to do what I want so that entry would not be necessary.

Again what I'm trying to do is make vBSEO understand the link format of www.website.com/da/restofurlhere.html and correctly rewrite it as www.website.com/restofurlhere.html?somevariable=da

I have used the variable "hl" in the past but as I understand this is used for highlighting of some pages so I will rename it to something else anyway.

The point is I'm just wondering if somebody with more vBSEO experience could point me to the correct file/line number in vBSEO for where I could implement my url rewriting idea properly.

Originally Posted by T2x

The point is I'm just wondering if somebody with more vBSEO experience could point me to the correct file/line number in vBSEO for where I could implement my url rewriting idea properly.

Yes, that would be great if paying vBSEO customers could get support for their sites and our threads on this topic.

Machine translation of languages is an important technology and the vBSEO team should support their customers who choose to implement this type of feature on their site.

I hope vBSEO will support us and we can move alway from "religious" discussions, and focus on the technology and facts, not opinions.

Originally Posted by T2x

What I am currently trying to do is rewrite my urls from the old format of www.website.com/page.html?hl=LANG to www.website.com/LANG/page.html

You can't use any .htaccess redirection for showthread pages , expect redirecting them to another url.

Originally Posted by reborg

Yes, that would be great if paying vBSEO customers could get support for their sites and our threads on this topic.

Machine translation of languages is an important technology and the vBSEO team should support their customers who choose to implement this type of feature on their site.

I hope vBSEO will support us and we can move alway from "religious" discussions, and focus on the technology and facts, not opinions.

We are offering support to vBSEO and our Support quality has always been great. However we will not support a modification that breaks vBSEO's main success Link Consensus.

As this thread has been discussed before and old thread is locked , there is no reason to keep it open.

P.S to thread started : If you have any questions , please feel welcome to create a Support ticket .