Pagination and LANGUAGE INDEXING Issues in Google Search Console

Design help Custom code
1

Hi everyone,

I’m encountering a couple of issues in Google Search Console and would really appreciate your advice:

  1. Pagination Issue:
    It seems Google is directing visitors to this URL:
    https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment?9ea5e96a_page=1
    Instead of this cleaner one:
    https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment
    Both URLs lead to the same content and page. Should I fix this, and if so, what’s the best approach?
  2. Language Indexing Issue:
    Our website is in both English (/en) and German (/de). However, 80% of the content in both versions is the same and in English. Google seems to be indexing only the English URLs and not the /de ones, as shown in the image. How can I ensure Google indexes the German version properly?

Thank you so much for your time and help!

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/arslans-radical-site-5d4c16?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=arslans-radical-site-5d4c16&preview=dae6980e348c25cb717894bbdd3081c5&workflow=preview

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2

i asked from google forum…they replied about this language indexing like this:
" Thanks for the reply.

Thanks for presenting the screenshots.

I took a look at it and I don’t think the “tell Google about the localized version of the page” method is communicated correctly!

I am not getting any hreflang errors, but I wasn’t sure if using the x-default value was correct in this case.

(x-default is used when the user’s browser settings do not match other languages or regions specified.)

I think the result is that pages with /de are normalized to pages without /de.

If the site is in only two languages, English and German, the x-default value seems unnecessary.

There are other ways to let Google know that there are multiple versions of a page for each language or region.

Try using these to modify your site and successfully tell Google about each version!"

3

You have a ton of notes and questions here, which is difficult to help with. If you need an SEO expert to help you work through these and fix them, drop me a message and we’ll discuss.

But here are a few notes-

There is nothing to fix. Google will index whatever it wants, and will choose whatever canonicals you want. The rule is that everything on your site… page titles, META descriptions, canonical, are all suggestions. Google frequently ignores them.

Your canonical is clearly correct, just check your code to have a look.

<link rel="canonical"
  href="https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment" 
  >

If it’s the same, it’s very unlikely Google will bother to index duplicate content. If it’s properly translated, then the next step is to make it worth indexing through proper SEO, backlinks, and generally improving your siterank overall. It’s a lot of work but it’s how you get Google to rank your site.

Webflow’s native localization does a fantastic job at this. It has all of your language variations correctly emitted on each page e.g.;

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.sustainabilityjobs.co/de/job-skill/hse-health-safety-and-environment">

Yes, x-default is needed and it points to your primary locale version.
Your sitemap also points to all localized variants.

Webflow has all of the bases covered.

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4

thanks @memetican … i have made changes to robots.txt : User-agent: *
Disallow: /*_page= …hope this is easier and better approach to stop pagination URL

5

I see what you’re trying to do but that’s a bad idea.
All of that valuable SEO content on every CMS template page is now orphaned.

I wouldn’t advise that you make it harder for Google to index your site- you just need to focus on improving that value of your content and backlinks so your pagerank improves.

6

Thanks! To avoid pagination issues, rather than modifying the robots.txt file, how about adding a rel-canonical tag to all template pages? and remove canonical tag from project setting? I mean, in the head section of the location, category, and skills template head sections.

or i think, i should follow what you said…

Have a nice day…!

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7

So again, I don’t have access to your GSC and I haven’t analyzed your indexing, but from what I can see you do not have any pagination issues.

Webflow is doing what it’s supposed to, and so is Google. You just have poor pagerank, so you’re not seeing the SERP results you want, because Google has very little to work with in terms of ranking info.

Focus on that, as I suggested.

No you cannot add a second canonical safely, you’d just send conflicting signals to Google, and it will most likely choose the first one ( Webflow’s ) anyway.

Most of the things you’re trying to do don’t actually solve any problems, and just make the SEOability of your site worse by confusing your signals to Google.

Keep it clean, focus on content and backlinks.

In rare cases I do modify client sites specially for SEO purposes, e.g. to create semantic paths from CMS content like /france/paris/cafes, or to change the information in the sitemap.xml. But this requires a reverse proxy and adds a lot of infrastructure on top of the site. For 99% of sites I wouldn’t even consider this- Webflow’s SEO approach is solid.

1 Like