One SEO professional asked John Mueller about their CDN (content delivery network) blocking Google Translate, and whether this is bad for SEO.
Their question was: the bot crawling is causing a real problem on their site. They have their CDN blocking unwanted bots. However, this also blocks the Translate This Page feature.
Their questions are, one: is it bad for Google SEO if the Translate This Page feature doesn’t work? Does this also mean that Googlebot is blocked?
And second: is there a way to get rid of the Translate This Page link for all of their users?
John explained that there are different ways, or different infrastructure on their site to access your pages.
On the one hand, there’s Googlebot and the associated infrastructure. John believes that the Translate systems are slightly different because they don’t go through robots.txt, but rather they look at the page directly.
And because of that, it can be that these are blocked in different ways. So in particular, Googlebot is something you can block on an IP level using a reverse DNS lookup, or you can allow it on an IP level.
And the other kinds of elements are slightly different. And if you want to block everything, or every bot other than Googlebot, or other than official search engine bots, that’s up to you.
When it comes to SEO, Google just needs to be able to crawl with Googlebot.
You can test that in Search Console to see if Googlebot actually has access.
And through Search Console, you can get that confirmation that it’s working.
But allowing or blocking the Translate This Page feature, according to John, is not critical for SEO.
This happens at approximately the 29:08 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 29:08
Then let me just take one more question here, before I run out of time and have to add other people in. The bot crawling is causing a real problem on our site. So we have our CDN block unwanted bots. However, this also blocks the Translate This Page feature. So my questions are, one: is it bad for Google SEO if the Translate This Page feature doesn’t work? Does it also mean that Googlebot is blocked? And second, is there a way to get rid of the Translate This Page link for all of our users?
John (Answer) 29:37
So I think there are different ways or different infrastructure on our side to access your pages. And there’s, on the one hand, Googlebot and the associated infrastructure. And I believe the Translate systems are slightly different because they don’t go through robots.txt, but rather they look at the page directly, kind of thing. And because of that, it can be that these are blocked in different ways. So in particular, Googlebot is something you can block on an IP level using a reverse DNS lookup, or you can allow it on an IP level.
And the other kinds of elements are slightly different. And if you want to block everything, or every bot, other than Google bots, or other than official search engine bots, that’s totally up to you. When it comes to SEO, Google just needs to be able to crawl with Googlebot. And you can test that in Search Console to see like, does Googlebot have access? And through Search Console, you can get that confirmation that it’s working okay. How it works for the Translate This Page, kind of like back end systems? I don’t know.
But it’s not critical for SEO. And the last question, like how can you block that kind of Translate This Page link, there is a no translate meta tag that you can use on your pages that essentially tells Chrome and the systems around translation, that this page does not need to be translated or shouldn’t be offered as a translation. And with that, I believe you can block the Translate This Page link in the search results as well. And the no translate meta tag is documented in our search developers documentation. So I would double check that.
