Hi,
On translated product category archive pages, Yoast outputs the wrong language SEO title and meta description on the frontend. Example: on the French category page, canonical and inLanguage are French, but Yoast outputs the Dutch title/meta description. In the backend, the translated category contains the correct localized Yoast SEO fields. Product category term relationships are correct, product_cat is set to translatable, WPML troubleshooting actions did not solve it, and resetting Yoast indexables did not solve it either. The issue affects only taxonomy/category archives, not regular pages. Main categories output Dutch across all countries; some subcategories output English across all countries.
For example on the category page hidden link instead of the english, de dutch meta title and description are shown.
When I open the category page, the meta is well translated in the back-end. For years it went well, it is just a few days ago this happened.
According to your documentation, translated taxonomy SEO metadata should be handled via WPML → Translation Dashboard → Yoast SEO → Term Meta, and translating it there may overwrite previous manual translations.
In our setup, only a single bulk item called “Term Meta” is available there. We cannot select individual product categories separately.
Because we already manually filled the localized Yoast SEO title and meta description in many translated product categories, we are hesitant to run this bulk translation action on live, as it may overwrite existing manual translations.
Could you confirm the safest way to fix this without overwriting all manually entered category SEO metadata?
Since the issue has been resolved using your workaround, I cannot see it on the frontend.
To better understand how this can be fixed without the workaround, I would need to reproduce the issue. Would it be possible for you to set up a staging site where the problem is still present, so we can investigate further?
That said, if your current snippet works well for your use case, you can continue using it.
I’ve set my next reply as private so you can provide the necessary details.
On this url hidden link you can see the issue. Because I did not put this url in the snippet code.
In the attachment you 2 print screens:
1. You can see I put an english meta title and description in the back end.
2. In the source code dutch meta appears
This is quite interesting—I’ve set my next reply as private.
Please let me know if I have your permission to create a copy of your site so I can run some tests locally. Also, could you let me know how I can temporarily disable the snippet you used to fix the issue?
You can download the previous plugin versions from your WPML.org account → Downloads section.
I’ve looked at this further and was able to resolve the issue on your staging site using the following steps:
1. Installed WPML SEO 2.2.4
2. Installed the Yoast Test Helper plugin
3. Used the Reset indexables tables option (hidden link)
4. Updated WPML SEO to version 2.2.5
After completing these steps, everything appears to be working correctly now.
sorry for my late reply. I don't receive wpml updated messages in my inbox anymore... Anyhow, it is not working on my staging environment. You did the steps 'live' on my staging website, right? I don't see it is working.
Perhaps it will work when I follow the steps, but then I am quite convinced it will surely happen again.
