I found the following issues to happen in two different sites, totally independent one from the other, but that had in common having been translated automatically (DeepL) and using Yoast plugin. I will describe the issues I faced here only with the purpose of being used for other users. **This is not a support ticket request, just want to give useful information for other WPML and Yoast users that translate sites automatically**
I think this information can be really useful for other WPML users that want to translate sites automatically using DeepL (my choice for this job) and also have Yoast SEO plugin installed.
I will describe the problems I found here so you do not mess your site when pressing the "Translate Automatically" button:
1- Yoast does not refresh correctly the XML sitemap for automatically created/translated URL's.
I found myself with both sites having incorrect URL's on the XML sitemap. For example, the URL's of the translations did not have the directory slug in the URL. So for example, the translation of the page example.com/hello-world for german language should be example.com/de/hallo-welt but the URL appearing in the XML sitemap was example.com/hallo-welt. The URL example.com/de/hallo-welt was visitable and working, but if you visited the same URL through the XML sitemap it was redirecting you to the original language. Sometimes was redirecting you to the featured image of the original post, or spitting a 404. If you care about your SEO, having the XML sitemap all messed up is no good.
2- Breadcrumbs from Yoast (in case you have them active) and some other strings Yoast will not work properly and will lead to a 404 or mess-up the site.
Yoast does not connect correctly the different elements around translations and elements like breadcrumbs, parameters and Author pages, so some elements from Yoast may change language or not work properly for the translations. I know there was a problem around breadcrumbs on WPML SEO 2.0, but this one is different, since is a issue with strings from Yoast as a whole.
3- Translations may lead to a 404 error when visiting them through the language switcher.
It may look like it's WPML or WPML Straing Translation plugin causing this issue, but in reality in Yoast SEO plugin.
4- Not related to WPML, but if you translate the site with WPML and DeepL you will find yourself with this problem: DeepL does not interpret Yoast parameters correctly.
The parameters from Yoast like %%separator%%, %%sitename%% and so on, DeepL does not translate them correctly and does things like adding a extra '%' symbol (so this symbol then appears on the metatitle and/or metadescription) or adds the parameters two times (so it makes the title incorrect). This looks nasty in the search results, and for the user and you may even think the site it's been compromised or hacked. If you care about your SEO this is serious and Google won't like it.
How to solve 1, 2 and 3: you need to reset and refresh the tables from Yoast SEO so all the information Yoast SEO plugin has about the content in your site after the automatic translation is 100% fresh.
How to do that: install Yoast Test Helper plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/yoast-test-helper/
How to use this plugin:
A- Install it
B- Go to Tools > Yoast test
C- Press the following buttons to reset: internal link counter, prominent words, tracking, configuration wizard and indexables tables and migrations.
D- Do the configuration Wizard from Yoast again (same process you do when you first install it)
E- Re-do the SEO data optimization process (will be done during the Configuration Wizard, unless you skip it).
After doing that Yoast will have fresh information about all the content present in your site and problems 1, 2 and 3 will disappear.
How to prevent 4: I really don't know (haven't tried yet), but maybe using DeepL glossary so parameters are interpreted and translated correctly?
How to solve 4: manually editing metatitles and metadescriptions with mistakes. Yes, it is a bummer and very time consuming, even if you use Yoast Bulk Editor. Didn't try using Search and Replace but what I did is scanning the site with Screaming Frog crawler to extract all the URL's with extra '%' symbols and duplicated parameters to locate them easily.
Hope this information is useful for other WPML users.
Thanks,
I can sadly not confirm such an issue on a new WPML test site, but I can not test with DeepL here - anyhow - I do not see any reason why DeepL should make a difference in this case.
Now, if you try to translate placeholders, that are not real text, then it is somehow expected that the automatic translation engine might not be aware of how to handle them, as those engines are designed for text translation and not for translating code or markup language.
Test Site: hidden link
We only translate the title of the post and this will by default create the slug. It usually should not really matter if this title is translated manually or automatically.
The same would count if you for example translate the slug directly inside the WPML Translation Editor.
Could you please confirm if those tests were done on a minimal setup while only running the latest versions of WPML and Yoast while having the WPML SEO Plugin activated?
Hello Andreas, thanks for your answer and for the tests you guys made,
The full suite of WPML was installed on both sites, including WPML SEO too. In one case we had WooCommerce with WP Bakery (with Woocommerce multilingual up&running) and in the other case we had Elementor Pro with ACF Pro (with ACF ML also installed).
We didn't test on minimal setups since we didn't know we could had any issue. We installed WPML and we run the whole thing on the real sites straight away after WPML was installed and configured on automatic translation mode ("Translate Everything" mode) checking what taxonomies and types of content we wanted to translate.
At the end, the issue with Yoast XML sitemap and 404 errors it's easy to solve making a reset of the plugin, once you know how to do it, it takes literally 10 minutes to have the whole thing solved.
The big issue is correcting hundreds of wrong metatitles and metadescriptions one by one. The first site had 198 products translated into 3 languages. The second site had 140 pages translated into 7 languages. That's 600 and 850 URL's respectively that had messed up meta tags. We are still manually correcting those an will take a lot of hours and money to have the whole thing fixed.
Metatitles and metadescriptions from Yoast in our sites have a mix of parameters and manually written text, so making a "Copy" of those fields into the translations wasn't an option for us, that's why we decided to translate them. Any site that pays attention to their SEO strategy and uses an SEO plugin will have a mix of manually written fields (to make them real and unique) combined with parameters (to make the job faster), at least that's how we do it in our agency. If the translation engine does not know how to interpret those parameters (we really thought they would be just passed like they were, in other words copied) it really should be advised. That was the intention with my message in the support board.
Thank you for the updates and for sharing the details so that this can help other users.
I can also escalate the issue to our team and see if this can be resolved from WPML's end but for that, I will need a clear step-by-step process to test and/or see the issue on the site.
It seems like I cannot see the issue on the sandbox site shared by Andres in the previous reply ( hidden link )
Or am I missing something here? Would you please mind sharing the exact steps for me to see or replicate the issue on the Sandbox site if you were able to see/replicate the issue there?
Hello Subash, thanks for your answer. I have a site with this problem, I send a snapshot of a scan of the site made with ScreamingFrog so you guys can see the problem with the metatitles (duplicated fields and even fields appearing by triple, and extra % symbols inside the metatitle field). You can see the snapshot here: hidden link
Note that the sites where we had the problems where not simple sites like the one you have in the sandbox, they were complex sites with tenths of plugins. Also we didn't translate the content via ATE but in bulk through WPML dashboard. In both cases it took a few minutes to have everything translated correctly.
If the issue can be replicated in a sandbox/clean site then it might affect a broad spectrum of users. If not, then the issue could be specific to your site due to the data and setup in your site.
As your original motive was to share information thank you a lot for that. Or if you still have the issue on your site, and need our help to fix them I can check your site further to try to find the issue and troubleshoot it.
For that, I would need to take a closer look at your site. So would you please mind sharing temporary access (WP-Admin and FTP) to your site? Preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated.
I have enabled a private reply for you to share the credentials securely, which means only you and I have access to it. Also please send me the link of a few Pages/URL with the issue so that I can check the issue easier.
IMPORTANT: Please take a complete backup of the site first to avoid data loss.
✙ I would additionally need your permission to make a copy of the site with plugins like Duplicator and deploy it on my local machine to test the issue further.
Regards,
Subash
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