Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to us. I understand that you have a multilingual website built with WordPress, WooCommerce, and Polylang, and you need separate sitemaps for each language (Italian and English) on your website.
To achieve this with Rank Math, you can follow these steps:
-
Install and activate the Rank Math plugin on your WordPress website.
-
Go to Rank Math > Sitemap Settings in your WordPress dashboard.
-
In the General tab, make sure the “Include Images” option is enabled if you want to include images in your sitemaps.
-
In the Sitemap Index tab, you will see the option to enable/disable sitemaps for different post types, taxonomies, and archives. Make sure all the necessary options are enabled for both Italian and English languages.
-
Next, go to Rank Math > Titles & Meta > Posts/Pages/Products (depending on your content type) in your WordPress dashboard.
-
Here, you can set the SEO title and meta description for each post/page/product in both Italian and English languages. Make sure to enter the relevant information for each language.
-
Repeat step 6 for all the necessary content types on your website.
-
Finally, go to your sitemap index at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. You should see separate sitemaps for each language, including Italian and English.
Please note that Rank Math works seamlessly with Polylang and should automatically generate separate sitemaps for each language based on your Polylang settings.
If you encounter any issues or need further assistance, please feel free to reply to this ticket, and our support team will be happy to help you.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Best regards,
RankBot Support
Sources:
How to Perform SEO for Multiple Languages Using Rank Math and TranslatePress » Rank Math
Multilingual SEO with Rank Math SEO & WPML » Rank Math
Hello,
thank you for your reply.
Point 6: I can’t see two languages, but only one language. Am I missing something?
Sitemaps infact are only in one language: https://cantinamingazzini.it/sitemap_index.xml
Let me know, thank you
Hello,
The translated URLs are actually already included in your sub-sitemaps. If you open the post or page sitemap, you will see the English URLs as well.
Also, please note that the translated sitemaps for any translated page do not need to be present. When a URL is present in the sitemap of the main language – that is good enough as the main language page itself contains an hreflang which is what Google recommends.
They do not recommend having each translated page URL in the sitemap:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/localized-versions
Hope that helps.
Thank you.
Thank you for your reply!
In the Google guide you linked, it is said:
You can use an XML sitemap to tell Google all of the language and region variants for each URL. To do so, add a <loc> element specifying a single URL, with child <xhtml:link> entries listing every language/locale variant of the page including itself. Therefore if you have 3 versions of a page, your sitemap will have entries for the URLs of each version, and each entry will have 3 identical child entries.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:xhtml=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel=”alternate”
hreflang=”de”
href=”https://www.example.de/deutsch/page.html”/>
<xhtml:link
rel=”alternate”
hreflang=”de-ch”
href=”https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html”/>
etc…
In the sitemap generated by Rank Math, we have “loc”, but we don’t have this part:
“<xhtml:link
rel=”alternate”
hreflang=”de-ch”
href=”https://www.example.de/schweiz-deutsch/page.html”/>”
Would it be possibile and useful to add it?
Thank you
Hello,
Thank you for your patience.
It’s completely fine to not have XHTML on your sitemap as per Google’s guidelines, as Rank Math only uses XML.
Google allows 2 methods for the translated pages:
1. To generate separate Sitemaps for all the languages.
2. To generate a single Sitemap and add hreflang tag on the respective pages.
The number #2 is what Rank Math follows, and this method is approved by Google with the hreflang on your pages.
Looking forward to helping you.
Hello,
Since we did not hear back from you for 15 days, we are assuming that you found the solution. We are closing this support ticket.
If you still need assistance or any other help, please feel free to open a new support ticket, and we will be more than happy to assist.
Thank you.
