According to the text over here. Chinese characters displayed in the url is not seo friendly. I have two questions.
Firstly: In order to make the url of different language versions of web pages seo friendly, the path in the url can only be in Latin characters right? (For example, the url characters in attached images are not seo friendly)
Second: In order to make the characters in the url seo friendly, is it better to use Latin characters or local language characters in the url of different language versions of web pages?
Welcome to the WPML support forum.
I'm not an SEO expert but I think using latin characters is better for SEO because other alphabets/characters would be "encoded".
Here is an example: hidden link.
So, we have 3 options in "WPML > Settings > Translated documents options > Page URL":
- Auto-generate from title (default)
This will take the translated title and use it to generate the URL (not recommended here if you want latin characters)
- Translate (this will include the slug in the translation and not create it automatically from the title)
In this case for each page you translate you will be able to also translate the URL. It gives you freedom to either copy the latin URL or create a new one but it's manual and you need to do it each time you translate a page.
- Copy from original language if translation language uses encoded URLs
That might be a better option here because it will use the English URL (English being your default language) automatically for all languages that have encoded URL.
If you choose this third option, please go to "WPML > Languages > Site Languages > Edit Languages" and make sure that "Encode URLs" is set to "YES" for Chinese languages.
How do I operate this step you mentioned on my site? "Please note that after activating that third option, You might need to re-validate all your translations to update their URLs. "
I've done the steps you suggested.
“Please see the attached screenshot. In the column marked in red, you should have"NO" for all languages using latin characters and "YES" for non-latin”
Depending on the way your translated your pages you can simply resend them to translation in bulk. If you used automatic translation or our Advanced Translation Editor (the screen with two columns to translate sentence by sentence), all your translations are saved in the translation memory.
- You can go to "WPML > Translation Management > Dashboard"
- Select your pages and resend them to translation
Thanks to translation memory all previous translations are saved. If you use automatic translation, you won't be charge any credits (unless you made some chances) and if you translated those pages yourself you only need to resave the translation.
I just tested the url character situation again for the Hindi translated version of my page. As seen in the attachment. It is not Latin but Hindi. This means that my work is not complete. Can you please tell me how to solve this problem? Turn the url characters of the Hindi page into Latin characters.
At this stage and to save time, I'd like to request an admin access. – preferably to a staging copy of your site. I will activate a private field for your next answer where you can provide that information safely (this field is only visible by you and the support team). Don't share your own admin account, create a new one that you will delete when we finish troubleshooting.
IMPORTANT: Before we proceed, please backup your site and database.
Thanks for the access. I made a short video of my intervention: hidden link
Basically the "Copy from original language if translation language uses encoded URLs" option wasn't selected.
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