German posts no longer indexed as Google chose different canonical than user

I proceeded with the error analysis here and it seems that there is an incompatibility with Polylang as multi lingual plugin. I set up the page to always show the language (either /de/ or /en/) in the permalink.

The correct URL in the example would be
https://www.wroclawguide.com/de/mit-dem-zug-nach-breslau/
and Yoast is also generating the correct canonical URL then.

However when I try to open this URL without /de/ then I am not getting a 404 error or redirect – this probably would be optimal – but I am ending up at a page that looks similar to the search results when nothing got found.

This page (https://www.wroclawguide.com/mit-dem-zug-nach-breslau/) then is generating a canonical URL of the starting page and instead of the correct URL with the /de/ included, Google is considering the start page as alternative URL to the blog post.

Now, I tried to use a filter to remove the canonical URL from the search results, but on the page above it still shows the start page.

Is there any way I can set up Yoast in a way that only regular blog posts, pages, categories etc are getting a canonical URL, but not these sort of “undefined” pages?

Hello @mseb,

Thanks for using the Yoast SEO plugin. I’ve addressed your concerns below:

Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

It means the page is marked as canonical for a set of pages, but Google thinks another URL makes a better canonical. Google has indexed the page that we consider canonical rather than this one.

1. Inspect this URL to see the Google-selected canonical URL under Page indexing > Google-selected canonical.
2. Look at the canonical you chose under Page indexing > User-declared canonical.
3. In your browser, look at the current page, the user-declared canonical, and the Google-selected canonical.
4. This error means that Google thinks that the tested page isn’t a duplicate of the user-declared canonical. Instead, Google thinks that the tested page is a duplicate of the Google-selected canonical.
   • If the Google-selected canonical is the tested page, then Google thinks that the tested page isn’t similar to any other pages.
   • If the user-declared canonical is not similar to the current page, then Google won’t ever choose that URL as canonical. A duplicate page must be similar to the canonical. (That’s what duplicate means.)

when I try to open this URL without /de/ then I am not getting a 404 error or redirect

I can confirm https://www.wroclawguide.com/mit-dem-zug-nach-breslau/ has a 301 redirect to https://www.wroclawguide.com/de/mit-dem-zug-nach-breslau/, created by Polylang. I believe this is the expected behavior or you could speak to them about it

This page (https://www.wroclawguide.com/mit-dem-zug-nach-breslau/) then is generating a canonical URL of the starting page

No, that page always redirects to the DE version and which has the correct canonical URL.

Now, I tried to use a filter to remove the canonical URL from the search results, but on the page above it still shows the start page.

I am unsure what you mean by removing a canonical URL from search results

Is there any way I can set up Yoast in a way that only regular blog posts, pages, categories etc are getting a canonical URL, but not these sort of “undefined” pages?

Do you mean you don’t want translated pages to have canonical URL at all?

Thanks for the feedback, meanwhile I have figured out that WP Rocket was causing the issue and prevented the 301 redirect.

I had to delete the cache folder via FTP and now the behaviour is as expected again, it seems related to this issue:

https://github.com/wp-media/wp-rocket/issues/6094

In the next days we will see if that was the fix and Google is reconsidering the choice of canonical URLs. Yet it is unclear to me how Yoast had injected the main page as canonical URL into the “Nothing found” page displayed by WP Rocket.

I will mark as resolved for now anyway.