Background of the issue:
I am trying to fix a large number of redirect chains and redirect loops occurring only in the Russian version of our site (benoit-partners.com/ru). These redirect loops appear mainly on category pages translated into Russian. It looks like some category slugs may have been generated automatically by WPML translation, which could have created conflicting URLs and multiple redirection patterns. We would like to understand what is causing these redirect loops and how to correctly configure the Russian categories without affecting the other languages (French, English, German, Italian, Thai).
Symptoms:
When our SEO tool crawls the Russian categories, it cannot reach the final URLs and reports 'redirect loop' or 'impossible to reach the final URL.'
Questions:
What is causing the redirect loops in the Russian category pages?
How can we correctly configure the Russian categories without affecting other languages?
Hello,
My name is Carlos, and I will continue working on this ticket.
To unlink two categories, you must make sure that the category in the original language is not translated, because the categories in the secondary languages can only link to categories in the original language if these categories in the original language are not translated.
A common workaround is to delete the incorrectly linked category and then link the category in the secondary language to the one in the original language that is not translated.
Please let me know if you need further assistance.
Thanks for your explanation.
We understand the workaround, but in our case we really prefer not to delete any category, because it could break SEO, indexed URLs, and internal structure.
Our issue is actually this:
➡️ The Russian category cannot be opened at all.
When we try to access the category, it immediately creates a redirect loop (screenshot attached). Because of this, we cannot access the category page, we cannot unlink it, and we cannot modify anything.
So the problem is not only the incorrect linkage — the real issue is that the category page itself is unreachable.
We would like to fix the translation link without deleting anything and without breaking the existing categories.
Could you tell us how we can:
Remove or fix the wrong translation link,
Without deleting categories,
Even though the Russian category page redirects endlessly?
