Extend canonical support by adding the rel=alternate for multi-lingual
Currently the canonical support solves us the problem of Google penalizing us for the 6+4*n double urls. While that's already helpful, I wonder if its support can be enhanced to give proper context on synced pages.
In order to enhance multi-lingual support we'd need two changes:
1) Allow us an option to set the primary language canonical tag to either include or exclude the /en/
2) Automatically insert the rel="alternate" and html lang="" tag alongside the canonical tag.
---
Imagine a website with 2 languages (English and Dutch) and 'welkom' being the Dutch synced alternative of 'home'. Currently Google sees the following:
<
link
href
=
"http://domainname/home"
rel
=
"canonical"
>
http://domainname/home ; [lang:EN | canonical:/home | alternative:]
<
link
href
=
"http://domainname/NL/welkom"
rel
=
"canonical"
>
http://domainname/nl/welkom ; [lang:EN | canonical:/NL/home | alternative:]
<
link
href
=
"http://domainname/en/home"
rel
=
"canonical"
>
<
link
rel=”alternate”
hreflang
=
"nl"
href
=
"http://domainname/nl/home"
/>
<
html
lang
=
"en"
>
http://domainname/en/home ; [lang:EN | canonical:/EN/home | alternative:/NL/welkom]
<
link
href
=
"http://domainname/nl/home"
rel
=
"canonical"
>
<
link
rel=”alternate”
hreflang
=
"en"
href
=
"http://domainname/en/home"
/>
<
html
lang
=
"nl"
>
http://domainname/nl/welkom ; [lang:NL | canonical:/NL/home | alternative:/EN/home]
Hello Jochem,
Thank you for contacting us!
What seems to be a workaround for your question for the time being is the following:
In the HTML included in the <head> tag (except title, keywords, description) section of the Page properties you can manually add the link tag with all attributes you want. Also, make sure to disable the Canonical URL option from the drop-down above.
As far as auto-generation of these is concerned, this might become part of future product roadmaps.
I hope this information helps.
Regards,
Ivaylo Angelov
Telerik
Hey Ivaylo,
On behalf of all serp lovers, thanks!
You're right, I can add the alternate tag manually to all the pages, just felt tideous :)
I figured since you guys already insert the canonical it would be just a few lines of codes to retrieve all language variants of a page and spit out rel=alternate links for those.
Anyone who cares about canonical, cares about alternate as well and if there weren't any language variants it wouldn't clutter the mark-up either so its a win for everybody.
Jochem