Too many languages = bad?

[moman]

During the migration from Google's to Microsoft's API, I had to disable 13 languages on my forum; fortunately, these languages weren't very popular among our visitors. They totaled about 50k pageviews, compared to almost 500k pageviews for the other languages combined.

After disabling these languages I immediately observed two things in Google Webmaster Tools:

• 1. The number of pages crawled per day almost doubled
• 2. The average crawl time halved.

I have one of two possible explanations for this: either google's API is slower, or having too many languages simply backfires and it takes away from indexing of your main site content. Thoughts?

[vBET]

I think the main cause is number of request to Translation API. If your system makes a lot of those then translation API can response you slower. This is why in our performance hints we advise to dissable some languages at the beginning. when cache will fill up then you can add more translations from time to time. Because most is cached already it will be OK. Also if some trnaslation API has limitations you will not brake those

[moman]

At the beginning (almost 2 years ago!) I indeed only had a subset of the languages active, but as time went on I ended up enabling them all. Guess that did more harm that good!

Unfortunately our site gets so much traffic that I can realistically only cache up to 4 days of translations (= > 10Gb). Perhaps having a separate "cache server" with several hundred gigs of cache data would be a better permanent solution, as once google shuts down their API I think we'll be relying a lot more heavily on cache (see my other recent thread).