mihaela.g

In my case, to get rid of this error, I have to disable W3 Total Cache. I can’t give up on Total Cache, pity. The only solution I have now is to:
– disable W3 Total Cache
– manual backup
– enable W3 Total Cache
But this means I can’t use Updraft for automatic backups.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by mihaela.g.

Thank you for the reply.

Technically, we’re not a customer yet, since we got no payment confirmation and the credit card appreantly was not charged. We tried three times to go through with the payment processs…

In any case, we weren’t sure if it’s a temporary technical issue with the website (maybe they changed something in the payment process recently and something does not work) or no longer selling the product to new customers.

Hoping we’d get a quick answer here on the support forum from other users to see if there’s any new customer who managed to go through with the payment on the website.

Thank you for the confirmation. I saw this behavior and didn’t know what was going on. I even tried to access the website from different networks to see if there’s smth wrong with my ISP.
So it looks like OceanWP demos are down for the moment. Not just the one from your message, but all of them became unavailable.

For our website we chose to completely remove the redirect on homepage. Now both homepage and homepage/en display the same content (no redirection).And homepage/en is set as canonical.
Hopefully this will solve ahuge problem we’re having with Polylang: all google searches with keywords in other languages than the default language for the website (which is English) results in only our English pages being displayed in the search result. This means that our German market, for example, is completely unaware of our existentce. If anyone else has this huge SEO issue with Polylang, please comment on solutions you found.

@1800alpacas, sorry, I did not receive a notification about your questions and I accidentally came across them now.
I couldn’t get it to work. I just cheated and input the number manually on each webpage.

For everyone interested, I’ve found another reviews plugin, one which gives less warnings/errors in html validation. It’s called WP Customer Reviews. It has good reviews. I’ve started using it yesterday and so far it seems to be doing thing right. Mind that you’l have to play with its settings a bit to find the best way to display reviews on a page so that it passes Google’s Structured Data Test Tool, but the good news is that there is a combination of settings that achieves good results.

For anyone else experiencing what I’ve described in my initial post, here’s what I figured out:

1. When “Hide URL language information for default language” is not checked, then two things should happen:

1.1 The homepage is redirected to homepage/en or whatever your default language is. This is done by a 302 redirect by Polylang. According to replies I got on Google Webmaster Support forums (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/wgKFrGwW-EA;context-place=forum/webmasters) and StackExchange (https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/120146/google-search-displays-the-english-version-of-a-webpage-for-a-romanian-keyword-s) the 302 redirect upsets Google and should be replaced with a 301 redirect. It’s possible, if you modify the plugin files. You’ll find instructions by @chouby on another thread here I believe for.

1.2 Your ‘posts’ and ‘pages’ will also be redirected to the ‘en’ or the default language if a user tries to access the link without having the language included in the URL.

What I mean: if user tries to go to example.com/page-1 -> (s)he’ll get redirected to example.com/en/page-1.
In my case, this only appeared not to happen, because I was lookign at pages that are neither ‘post’ nor ‘page’. They are a more complicated thing created by my theme. The redirect does happen for all other regular ‘pages’ or ‘posts’.

I believe this is the 301 redirect that @chouby mentioned in his previous message. It is, of course, initiated by Polylang. I think Chouby meant to say that WordPress implements the actual mechanism for redirects, but the redirect instruction is given by the Plugin, it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

2. The best approach is to hide URL for the default language, though. It makes life easier. And you might figure out after one year that you should have done this from the start, but then you have to change your links in all your Google Ads and Facebook Ads and add 301 redirects from the old links to the new links because now many website are pointing to you.

I recommend going through the requirements that Google itself details here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/review-snippet. Test your desired page (probably the homepage) with Google Structured Data Testing Tool, available online for free, no account needed. You’ll see what structured data Google recognizes from your webpage and you can compare it to their requirement on the link above.

Thank you for the quick reply !
Let me break down the information in your reply so I can pair your answers with the questions in my post and see if I understand correctly.

<<This works for me on my test install.>>
Do you mean that you tried to install a general wordpress dummy website, installed the Polylang plugin, left the “Hide URL language information for default language” unchecked and then observed that:
1. the generic URL (let’s say https://example.com) redirects to the default language you set in Polylang (let’s say https://example.com/en) – this is a 302 redirect done by Polylang and works for us too
2. any other generic URL (e.g. https://example.com/page-1) redirects to that page in the default lnaguage (let’s say https://example.com/en/page-2) – this is the part that does not work on our website
Is my understanding occrect, is this what you mean by the above quoted statement ?

<<Note that the redirect that you are expecting is not made by Polylang but handled directly by WordPress.>>
Which redirect is handled by WordPress ? I am confused by this statement because I am not using any other multilanguage plugin. If I didn’t have Polylang, there would be no ‘en’, ‘ro’ or ‘de’.
So I don’t know how WordPress handles language redirects… I thought WordPress doesn’t have default support for a multilingual website. Can you please expand on the above quoted statement ?

<<I noticed that your site uses shared slug /repairs/ across all languages. This feature is not available in Polylang, but it is in Polyang Pro.>>
I actually thought that being able to change the slug for each language was a Pro feature. We weren’t keeping the ‘repairs’ slug the same across all languages on purpose, we couldn’t figure out how to set one for each language, actually. Are you sure that language customisation of the slug is a free option ?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by mihaela.g.

Hi @cmborchert,

Our company’s website is running into this exact problem. We also use Polylang !

We just noticed that Google search for keywords in Romanian (one of the languages supported by our website) always returns the English version of those pages. Same as in cmborchert’s case, the English pages do not contain the Romanian keywords. This is a very big problem for us too. We have noticed a drop in customers from Romania and we couldn’t understand why and now we finally found this Google search problem ?? Our Romanian clients can no longer find the Romanian pages in Google search.

Maybe someone from the Polylang team can help us find the source of the problem ?
@cmborchert Did you manage to solve the issue for your client ?

Oh, never mind, I went ahead and disabled the structured data feature using the tutorial I found here:
https://www.remicorson.com/remove-the-woocommerce-3-json-ld-structured-data-format/
I leave the link here, maybe someone else needs to do the same.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 3 months ago by mihaela.g.

I installed and activated the plugin and was going through the readme to see how to proceed. I created a German version of a page for which I already had English and Romanian versions. I am not sure at which point the English and Romanian versions disappeared and I thought I lost them completely. But luckily Lingotek plugin had moved them to trash for some reason. When I restored them from trash, the formatting was off.

@jhill5 Again, this is not about whether a monthly fee of 30 USD is right or whether the plugin should do stuff for free. It is about hiding the fact that the free version does not help at all. It only generated buggy code (with lots of gibberish that I had to delete) which you cannot actually edit, because you need the paid version for that.

And here is the free version of adding structured data to a website, for everyone interested. It takes 15-30 minutes, depends on how much one wants to learn about this.

1. Generate the structured data markup for your page of interest using this tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/
It’s really straightforward.

2. Add the generated code to your page’s header. I used this plugin for that: Header and Footer Scripts (not affiliated in any way)

Optional, but recommended further step:
3. Use another Google tool to test your enhanced page: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

PS: If you want to find out what other yummy stuff you can specify in your markup, take a look at: https://schema.org/Product (replace product with article, service or whatever your page is about)

Did I miss anything ?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 7 months ago by mihaela.g.

It was a combination of both and the problem is now solved. Thank you for your help !

@jhill5 Thanks for the opinion, I am sure the community finds it valuable, escpecially since you seem to know the developers personally and thus can vouch for how serious your friends are.
However, the amount charged for this service is not a topic of my review. My claim, as stated twice in my review, is that the fee is covert rather than the developers being upfront about what the plugin can do for you in its free version. The description of this plugin lists all the things the paid version can do for you. What’s being purposely not mentioned is that, although there is a free version that most of us will try, the free version doesn’t really do anything. This is an old marketing trick that we, the customers, no longer tolerate. As a seller, it is dishonest to basically hide (or avoid to mention) the cost of a service until the user already inversted time in getting familiar with your product, when the question becomes “should I quit and try a new plugin and consider this just wasted time?” or “should I just go ahead and pay for a membership now that I already invested time in this ?”