seo issueas

  • Resolved ozhovnir

    (@ozhovnir)


    9 years, 4 months ago

    We’re using qtranslate-x to have an english and german versions of the site, english being the default/primary ones. We got the plugin working but noticed that while searching for content on google that we have on our website it’s giving us links to the german version of pages/posts. I’ve added /de/ as disallowed in my robots.txt but now sure if that would work, since /de is not a physical directory. Is there a more graceful way of preventing search engines crawling our non-english content?

    Thanks,

    OZ

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/qtranslate-x/

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author John Clause

    (@johnclause)

    You probably do your testing from a “german” browser, I mean google knows that that your browser mostly use German, that is why it gives you German version. On english or other browser it will give you English link. At least this is how it is expected to work. I think crawlers learn it from “hreflang” attributes of your HTML sources. Why do you wish to change this design? It seems that you would rather want it to be that way, is not it?

    Thread Starter ozhovnir

    (@ozhovnir)

    No, we’re in the states, so the locale is America and the browser language is english, which is why it’s strange that’s its presenting us with german links. Do you know if adding a disallow command on /de in robots.txt will accomplish what I’m looking for or is there something within the settings of the plugin I can adjust?

    Plugin Author John Clause

    (@johnclause)

    >Do you know if adding a disallow command on /de in robots.txt
    No, I do not think this will help. I think they learn it from “hreflang”, as I mentioned, meaning to respond to this question.

    It is indeed strange and unexpected. Nothing comes in mind that can be adjusted in plugin. Sitemaps may help, but it should work without them. I would try first to understand what is happening, why it is so.

    Maybe it is because you used to go to german version lately and google memorizing it. I noticed that google account you are logged into affects the search. Can you try to do the same search under ‘incognito’ session? Other browser which is not aware of the current google account you are using?

    Other thing, are you sure google gives you german link? Maybe it gives you neutral link, but german is shown to you because that was the last language you used on this site at the time of testing?

    I would like to be able to reproduce the problem. If you do not wish to publish your urls, write to us privately: https://qtranslatexteam.wordpress.com/contact-us/. Thank you.

    @ ozhovnir – You can prevent that a visiter located in US come by accident to the german version, by using “IP Loc8” plugin. You can set a language based on the country, upon first visit.

    Thread Starter ozhovnir

    (@ozhovnir)

    Thanks John, i submitted the contact form with some more info like you asked.

    Thanks torsten, I’ll have to check it out. Do you know how much additional overhead is caused by this plugin?

    Plugin Author John Clause

    (@johnclause)

    Hi @ozhovnir: I got your message, I took a look at the page source and discovered that the line at the top

    <html lang="en" prefix="og:https://ogp.me/ns#">

    does not change with language, as it should.

    If you take a look at the same line under any standard WP theme like “Twenty Fifteen”, for example, it shows lang="de-DE" for German and lang="us-US" for English. It looks like that line is hardcoded on your theme to always show English. This is definitely a problem which needs to be fixed. I believe google search will work correctly after the fix and after google cache is expired.

    Take a look how it is done under any standard theme and change your theme to do it the same way. This is unrelated to qTranslate-X.

    If you need further help, please continue through private communication, I am closing this ticket for now with the hope that this helps.

    Thread Starter ozhovnir

    (@ozhovnir)

    ok thanks, I’ve adjusted the header, so let’s see if it fixes the issue. Now sure how long it takes for google cache to expire.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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