Hi Aki, this is the community forum, and you might want to contact support directly ( top right button ) to see if they have a solution for this.
A few things to clarify-
- Search Index settings affects only Webflow’s own site search feature
- At the page level under page settings, you can also find an option to exclude the page from the sitemap.xml and to add a meta noindex tag, so that search engines will exclude the page
- To my knowledge, neither of these settings are locale-specific
I think what you’re trying to accomplish is this;
- Build your site, and translate it page by page over time
- Have Webflow be aware of which pages are translated and into which locales
- On that page, have the locales switcher reflect that list accurately
- Maybe, ideally, also reflect that in the sitemap, alt lang links, and noindex meta - effectively make those untranslated pages disappear from view
As far as I know, Localization is not designed to support the setup you’re imagining. Usually someone would translate the entire site using machine translation, in a matter of hours, and the site would be available in all languages.
Even step 2 above- identifying localized pages, is tricky because most sites have a component-based nav and footer area. Localize that once, and now all of your pages contain localized content.
I think there’s a failure point here as well in that if I switch to Deutsch, and then navigate to a page that is not translated to Deutsch, I’ll be auto-switched back to English, which may not be ideal here.
However if I had to build that for a client, I’d add my own indication, probably in the form of a custom attribute on the BODY element like suppress-de I’d then use that with a piece of custom CSS to hide the Deutsch locale switcher option, only when that attribute exists.
That will at least give you the ability to hide switcher options at the page level, even though they are mechanically there. But it won’t solve for CMS pages where each individual blog article might have a different locale translation state. That would likely require some JS.
Another more complex approach is to turn your locale switcher itself into a component, and to add Visibility properties for each locale selection. You can then bond those to switch fields in your CMS pages to turn on/off specific locale options by CMS item.
I think this is all a rather skin-deep solution though. If you really wanted to remove that content you’d need to build a reverse proxy that completely audits and reforms your site around the available locales.
