Polylang translated homepage meta data issues

Hello again!

There are a lot of issues with the subdirectory settings of Polylang and the homepage, all of which are out of our control. You’ll be facing these issues with all SEO plugins because Polylang doesn’t send the correct information to WordPress; at least, not as early as it should. I have tried fixing these issues via The SEO Framework, only to find the modifications breaking after a few Polylang updates. The monkey-patches in Polylang brought specifically for other SEO plugins will break things as well–this is too complex to comprehend.

There’s an active issue running here for the homepage canonical URL:
https://github.com/sybrew/the-seo-framework/issues/325

As for the homepage titles, I suggest emptying all fields in the global Homepage SEO Settings meta box and supplying the data via the homepage edit screens instead. You might want to provide a canonical URL there, too; this might solve the issue.

I also suggest setting up the plugin to translate via subdomains, as it’s a little more consistent. It will require you to set up some subdomain DNS values.

The correct approach:
Now, the solution is abiding by the WordPress API — which no traditional translation plugin can inherently do: WordPress must be hijacked to provide such translation support. The only correct approach is using WordPress’ multisite, where you set each subsite to a specific language, which is used exemplarily by (es.)WordPress.com and (es.)www.remarpro.com. This approach is further supported by MultilingualPress.

I hope this helps! Cheers ??

Thanks for your response. So you mean there is no way to use Polylang+SEO Framework without facing those issues I addressed? That’s sad, I will have to switch to another SEO plugin and I was enjoying your plugin very much.

Yeah, all problems get solved immediately with 2 of the major SEO plugins I tested. I would love that you could implement a solution, I hate having to use those cluttered shitty well-known SEO plugins with all my guts.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by dm652.

Hmm looks like like the problems get solved with one of the small ones (less downloads than yours). I dont believe polylang published a monkey-patch for the small one. Maybe you are missing something?

Hi again ??

They’ve only patched Yoast. Other plugins might’ve patched Polylang.

It could’ve been fixed if the language switcher and language detector were running independently: https://github.com/polylang/polylang/pull/55
Unfortunately, that pull request will break the whole translation plugin. I did mention the plugin was hijacking WordPress ??

In any case, you can solve this within The SEO Framework, I just confirmed the steps below to be working. But, this will only work if the homepage isn’t a blog archive.

1. Go to the affected homepage.
2. Edit it.
3. Go to the “Homepage SEO Settings” meta box
4. Go to the Visibility tab.
5. In the Canonical URL field, write out the real canonical URL.
6. Save the page and confirm the results.

Edit: The same goes for the titles. Just be sure to empty the global SEO Settings’ homepage title fields.

I hope this helps!

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Sybre Waaijer. Reason: Also works for other meta fields

I’m afraid that solution does not solve my problem. The only page showing the “Homepage SEO Settings” metabox is this one:

/ (the default homepage in Spanish)

It is the translated version that has the title, description and canonical issues and that one doesn’t show the “Homepage SEO Settings” metabox. It just shows a “Page SEO settings” metabox and the data I introduce there does not work because the page keeps showing title, description and canonical identical to the default homepage in Spanish.

Hi again ??

With so many anomalies involved, I’m afraid I can’t provide further insights without knowing the affected domain ?? Could you inform me of which through my contact page? Pointers to the affected pages would be most helpful.

Thanks!

Sent!