WalkInYorkshire

Yes I had noticed that the plugin uses hreflang however this might not have been set-up properly and might interact with other plugins like Yoast WordPress SEO which sets canonical attributes automatically.

For example in your current setting:

For URL https://mysite.com/content1 would find the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/content1&#8243; />
(that’s from Yoast WordPress SEO)

And then
<link hreflang=”en” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/en/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
<link hreflang=”fr” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/fr/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
(that’s from qtranslate-X)

And then for URL https://mysite.com/en/content1 you would find the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/en/content1&#8243; />
(again that’s from Yoast WordPress SEO)

And then
<link hreflang=”en” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/en/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
<link hreflang=”fr” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/fr/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
(and that’s from qtranslate-X)

Finally URL https://mysite.com/fr/content1 you would find the following:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/fr/content1&#8243; />
(again that’s from Yoast WordPress SEO)

And then
<link hreflang=”en” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/en/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
<link hreflang=”fr” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/fr/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
(and that’s from qtranslate-X)

Above is the wrong set-up because you are indicating to search engines that there are 3 different pages (2 duplicate English and 1 unique French) while ideally you would only want to have 2 (1 unique English and 1 unique French)

A Solution would be:

On URL https://mysite.com/content1

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/en/content1&#8243; />

And then no need to add the hreflang tags here. Only the canonical page should have them.

And on URL https://mysite.com/en/content1

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/en/content1&#8243; />

And then
<link hreflang=”en” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/en/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
<link hreflang=”fr” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/fr/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />

Finally on URL https://mysite.com/fr/content1

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mysite.com/fr/content1&#8243; />

And then
<link hreflang=”en” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/en/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />
<link hreflang=”fr” href=”https://walkinyorkshire.com/fr/content1&#8243; rel=”alternate” />

This set up above is correct because you are self referencing the canonical pages (English and French) with their own hreflang attributes (en and fr) and at the same eliminating the duplicate English content by pointing to the actual canonical page

You can find more info here:
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html

There will still be a duplicate mysite.com and mysite.com/en

Disable your cookies in your browser and try yourself. They will both return a 200 status.

Also look in the source code for your mysite.com/en URLs and I bet you will find a mix of URLs with mysite.com and mysite.com/en therefore sending bots on confusing paths.

And what about if someone links to mysite.com/en?

In any case search engines will choose one page or another to show in the the search engine result pages (never both) but because you are always sending bots on confusing paths, your pages won’t rank as well as they should.

I have nothing against the plugin, it’s solving a good issue for users but you can’t call it SEO friendly.

Hi John,

Despite what you are saying unfortunately 302 redirects are not SEO friendly as is the use of cookies to switch languages.

I’ll try to explain:

– 302 redirects: They are designed to be temporary redirects and therefore should only be used in situation where you have a URL you need to temporary change (example a promotion that would run for a certain period of time). The idea is that you have two pages with the same value and for bots it means they have to wait to start crawling the new page. So they stay behind and don’t go to the new page. Having said that if they keep coming back and still see a 302 redirect after a while, they will start crawling the new page. If they like what they see they will start indexing the new page.

In terms of SEO I would therefore always recommend a 301 redirection. It’s a strong indicator to search engines that a new page has been created and that you want that page to be indexed instead of the old page. Beside every single pages holds what is called an amount of authority (or what was used to be known as PageRank for Google) and that authority will be passed on straight away with a 301 redirect (about 90 to 99% of it actually). As described above with a 302 redirect the authority is not passed on straight away and is initially blocked within the old page. It will eventually be released but in the meantime will have a negative impact on your SEO and you risk seeing your pages going down the rank for a while.

More info about redirections and SEO:
– https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
– https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633

Cookies to switch languages: again this is not SEO friendly unfortunately. This time the reason is simple: bots can’t read cookies and this will result in the creation of duplicate content. On my site I had disabled cookies with your plugin and found that all “default” languages pages now had two versions. Here are some examples:

– https://example.com/ = https://example.com/en/
– https://example.com/content1/ = https://example.com/en/content1/

This is a real problem in terms of SEO as duplicate content confuses search engines. They don’t like to show all pages with exact match content and they will decide themselves which pages should be indexed and ranked. With Google if there are too many duplicate pages it can even lead to be hit by the Panda algorithm. And with duplicate content the real problem is about links. Bots will only find pages if they have been linked. With your plugin, you are not handling internal links well and many of them don’t have the /en/ subfolder I’d like to see. So these will be crawled and lead to detection of further duplication. Not even mentioning external links – webmasters will have a choice of linking to an /en/ or non /en/ page creating even more confusion for bots.

Again more info about duplicate content:
– https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en
(Note that in this doc. Google favours solutions such as 301 redirections or canonical to deal with duplicate content)
– https://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/
(Yoast talks especially about cookies in the “Session ID’s” section)

Hope this helps but in the meantime and up until these problems have not been solved I will have to find an alternative solution and not use your plugin any more.