search

jamulussoftware / jamuluswebsite

This is the GitHub Pages repository for the Jamulus main website. For the jamulus application source code, please visit jamulussoftware/jamulus.
https://jamulus.io
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
16 stars 79 forks source link

[Bug] Untranslated pages make Google complain about duplicate content #986

Closed gilgongo closed 1 week ago

gilgongo commented 3 weeks ago

Google just hit me with an alert (think they must have just done an index run) about a bunch of pages that are "Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical".

These pages have the same content but different URLs (eg this page which is untranslated). It means they are not being indexed by Google, so that's bad if they get translated later.

So it looks like we need to add rel="canonical" to all our EN pages to rectify this.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls

And see:

  • If you're using hreflang elements [we are], make sure to specify a canonical page in the same language, or the best possible substitute language if a canonical page doesn't exist for the same language.

  • When linking within your site, link to the canonical URL rather than a duplicate URL. Linking consistently to the URL that you consider to be canonical helps Google understand your preference.

So I think the problem may be that we're marking all our pages as "alternate" and not indicating a preference for the canonical maybe? At least, I think if the non-EN page was all (or mostly) the same as the EN version, then Google wouldn't know which to pick:

image

So the EN version here needs to have rel="canonical" here. Might help also have that on the link to the EN version in the language switcher too.

gilgongo commented 1 week ago

Closing as now incorporated in https://github.com/jamulussoftware/jamuluswebsite/pull/993