I am trying to:
The pages hidden link and hidden link are not indexed by Google.
Link to a page where the issue can be seen: This can be seen on Google itself with the site: operator or in Google Search console.
I expected to see: When entereing the URL's above I expect to see them in Googles index. Instead only the English page hidden link is indexed.
Tried to deactivate the language redirect and asked for indexing in Google. This worked but when the browser redirects got added the URLs diappeared from Googles index.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Hello!
We are not really responsible for what the search engines index or not. if you have an SEO plugin and/or have a sitemap that you can send to the search engines via their search console, then you should be good to go but it's ultimately their decision to make.
However, your homepage in japanese is indexed as you can see here: hidden link
the same applies to the german one: hidden link
You mention that you enabled the language redirect and in that case the problem is that the crawlers all appear as if they were coming from the usa, russia or china, so they will try to redirect to those languages (Englis, Chinese, Russian), that's why you end up with the EN version always indexed and have a hard time indexing and ranking in the other languages.
The redirect is not needed nowadays. Google and the search engines in general are quite smart and they will know which version to show you. to me, the EN version will always appear first, to a Japanese person searching in japanese, the japanese version will be shown and so on.
And they are also mentioned when you enable the browser redirect option in WPML but that tends to happen with external plugins as well since it's not something caused by a plugn but by the logic behind the scenario: The crawlers are treated by the browsers as regular users when it comes to the language since a browser needs to have a language specified and they assign English when no language is found.
Unfortunately I can't replicate that the German and Japanese homepage are indexed. What I see on the screenshot also looks like something else. I have added 2 screnshots from Google Search console stating that the 2 URLs are not indexed.
The sitemap.xml has been uploaded and you can also see on the screenshot that the sitemap is recognized by Google.
Am I understanding your message correctly: Once browser language redirection has been added Google is not able to crawl the page properly?
I recommend you disable this option and resubmit your sitemaps to google. Note that disabling the option will not have an immediate impact. Google will need to crawl your site again and properly re-index it (we have no influence on this process).
Finally, I see that you are using Yoast SEO and WPML SEO but you haven't installed our add-on "String Translation" which will help you translate strings of text from Yoast (and other plugins) that are not in the content. As you can see in the "Getting Started" section of our tutorial, this plugin is necessary: https://wpml.org/documentation/plugins-compatibility/using-wordpress-seo-with-wpml/
PS: Regarding your Google search: Google personalizes search results more and more. There are many factors that go into Google's algorithm such as your geolocation, your browsing history, browser's language, etc. When you perform those tests, try from another browser and/or in incognito mode, and if possible use a VPN to change your geolocation.
