I am building a multilingual site for a client and I'm using your plugin for the first time. My client is asking me a question which I'd like to confirm with you before I respond to them.
They would like to know if someone Google's something in a different language (e.g. Italian), will the Italian pages/products show up on the search engine, and not the English versions?
Will the website rank in all the languages set up on the site, not just English? I have installed the WPML SEO plugin and I've installed Yoast SEO. However, I haven't found any settings to ensure the compatibility and to ensure the the website will rank in all languages.
Any information you can provide would be very helpful.
I'm pretty sure you will get all the answers there but to summarize:
- Each language will have its own pages and URL structure which will help google understand the site structure.
- On each page you will have hreflang and x-default balises which will indicate to google the make the connection between all languages/translated versions.
- WPML SEO is an add-on that makes WPML and Yoast Seo 100% compatible, you will be able to translate title and meta descriptions. However Yoast is the SEO plugin that will do the "SEO work".
Ref: https://wpml.org/documentation/related-projects/wpml-seo/ https://wpml.org/documentation/plugins-compatibility/using-wordpress-seo-with-wpml/
Few things to consider that are not in this documentation:
- Don't forget to submit your sitemaps to Google Search.
- You will see that we don't talk in Step 2 about language as parameter (doman.com/?lang=it). That's because this URL format is not recommended for SEO. It doesn't create the separate URL structure I mentioned above.
Ref: hidden link
- WPML has another option that could impact your SEO: Automatic redirection according to the browser's language
In "WPML > Languages > Browser language redirect", I recommend that you don't activate this option. If you try to activate it, you will get a pop-up warning with some links to relevant documentations explaining why it's not recommended.
A last thing regarding your Google search results:
Google personalizes search results more and more, they are practically tailor-made to the user. There are many factors that go into Google's algorithm such as your geolocation, your browsing history, browser's language, etc. When you perform tests to see which version/language ranks, try from another browser and/or in incognito mode, and if possible use a VPN to change your geolocation.
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