I got several emails from concerned non english readers that the translated pages of this blog were showing errors and were being blocked by Google translation services. I have been using the wonderful Global translator wordpress plugin to create multilingual pages of my site. The translation service is directed via Google translation services. But if you overquery the service, they might consider the request as spam.
As one of these translated pages got linked up in a forum. and visitors started dropping by, the dynamic translation queries increased substantially, and all translated pages started displaying 403 Forbidden errors by Google and the page said that “queries look similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users we cannot process your request right now”.
While I was wondering what the problem was, I remembered that Everton had asked a similar question recently on his blog if Google was blocking third party translation services? He uses the Angsuman Translator plugin for machine translation on his blog. In response to the question taragana had replied in comments
“They will however prevent any site who is excessively using their bandwidth. They normally reset it after 24 hours or so. The way around it is simple. Simply set your wp-cache 2 plugin to 10 hours or more of caching time to reduce the load on their server.”
Since I still have some issues with the WP-Cache and it still turns up internal server errors when I activate it (even other readers have a similar problem with the latest release), I had to find another option. I found that the Global translator wordpress plugin also has a caching support (though labeled Experimental – which I had not yet activated, you never know how those experimental features turn out!). So I enabled the translation cache, set it to 36000 seconds (that is 10 hours, against the usual 3600 seconds or one hour) and within the next 24 hours, all translated pages were fine.
This highlights the fact that enabling cache is not optional, but an essential feature since they query Google translation service and multiple pings from your blog could get them to block it and make all those translated pages a bunch of 403 Forbidden errors.